Leave Me Behind (opens in new tab)

Mario Savio said a few lines when the industrial revolution peaked:

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious Makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels Upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it That unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all

Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well. I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.

This article was very eye-opening for me. I think I understand the author's pain and I could certainly feel it while reading the article. The fact that it was "the people" that made the difference kind of surprised me, and then I realized it was because I have seldom had the experiences he's had and that this might have a major impact on the way I (and others) view the technology.

For me, building software has often been a solitary process in which I was far more obsessed with it than those around me. I'm not in a tech-heavy area and I don't have a ton of well-informed people to talk to about programming, software engineering, or AI. I have had experiences like the author in which I needed to learn a new technology or a new language but ended up doing so on my own at home, not with the assistance of a much more knowledgeable developer with significantly more experience.

To me LLMs have left us in a situation where the following things are true and moving forward lies somewhere in figuring out how to reconcile / resolve these things:

- You can use LLMs and learn things or not learn things; this is a result of the approach, desire, and willpower of the user.

- There is a level of skill associated with using LLMs much like nearly everything else in existence. The user's skill level impacts their perception of the technology and also affects the way those around them view the technology. Unskilled users will generate more negative sentiment.

- Some people love to do the things the machine is good at and do not want the machine to do them, while others hate to do the things the machine is good at and want the machine to do them. I realized at some point this year that I don't love programming anywhere near as much as I love building and designing systems and solving problems.

- Software development is many things wrapped up in one and talking about it as a single thing makes it more confusing. Some people like to think through the logic of the application and have an LLM write the code while others want the LLM to think up the solution, implement it, and test it. These are two very different people with likely different goals and different desires.

- When someone else looks at Claude or ChatGPT they might see something completely different than what you see.

I hope some of this resonates with others.

I think this post is either LLM-written, or written in a standard blogpost style of today which is increasingly becoming LLM-like. Sam Kriss had a good recent post pointing out some of the "tells": https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writin...

Most humans derive their purpose and meaning from their work. Has always been that way. What do you think happens when you remove meaning from people’s lives at scale? It won’t be pretty.

I can relate to this article. My reaction to what is happening is also: "Leave me behind".

However, missing the joy of the old-school way of growing as a developer is not only the wrong reason, but also very dangerous according to Darwin.

Our customers don't care about how it is made after all, but they do care about long-term support, costs, and predictability, etc.

But I'm not sure whether we can say we made a real net positive progress in the industry. The whole thing is a big mess. In many cases, AI moves us in the same direction in turbo mode, making it not only messier and more expensive but also dangerous.

I tell them, "Leave me alone", as I see this mess as an opportunity if you think the right way, starting from the first principles.

Just do it the way you want to do it and have fun [1] (I've recently started doing streams where I showcase a mix of AI + manual coding and why I think that's best).

The "powers that be" would prefer if you sideline yourself. Instead, pop a bird and say "thank you kind sir, but no."

[1] https://youtu.be/KqQpYgvrEqM?si=gfGCOqgmF4iy4077

I don't think AI changed anything at all to the possibility of communicating between humans. This is a job that you've always been able to do alone in your cave.

Like the artisans/craftsmen in many places (especially Japan), hand craft will always carry enduring meaning — machines ultimately can't replace everything humans shape with their hands. But historically at least, they can replace over 99.9% of it.

I absolutely understand this sentiment. I've been working in tech since the late 90s and I have had MORE than my share of let-me-off-this-ride moments.

But this post (and the many I see like it) feels like giving up. And now's not the time for empathetic people to give up.

Technology is how we expand human capability. We are well within our rights to pick and choose how we interact with that capability. But it's starting to terrify me how it seems that the worst people in the world are more than willing to wield this power, while good people opt out. Billionaires are doing a remarkable job at making their vision of the future seem inevitable. Don't fall for it.

If more people aren't willing to help us steer this capability towards a better future, then we all know how this ends.

Nice read, and agreed, leave me behind. I have been telling people that I am running a John Henry experiment with LLMs. I don't use them just so I can prove the human is better than the machine, even if it leaves me in the dirt like John.

Its classic HN to dismiss the emotional cost of change as sunk cost stages of grief. A person is allowed to love their work and miss deep understanding, and allowed to be nostalgic for a preferred way of working. It's human and everything they have shared in this post is unequivocally true about software dev and moving into a career, arguably even before LLMs took over.

What I mean is that the thrilling buddy system coding starts to happen less frequently over a career, and the time for deep exploring and side projects is organically maximized early and during school.

While LLMs have forced that divide to be more stark, the human connection and sense of wonder has always required maintenance, and it's best to get into the habit of maintaining it before your 36th JIRA triage meeting in a week completely destroyed your love of the industry.

Well before LLMs I went through exactly what TFA describes when I had to adapt from grad school labs to industrial labs, then to project management or task leadership (even just filling in for my boss), and each new job has required me to say goodbye to great friends and colleagues and make new ones.

Its just inevitable to fall out of love of the craft, we all could probably write this post for our own reasons.

The lack of humanity or ability to empathize with someone else’s feelings displayed in these comments, instead labeling the author’s personal experience as “main character syndrome” or “cope” demonstrates to me that the author may be correct that AI usage degrades the human experience.

It also is a great example of why AI has such a PR problem among normal people.

people need to reframe coding agent usage. i see a lot of framing in zero-sum terms where it's either all dev or all agent, and then people start dooming and glooming over the latter. in reality it's like that one post on here a few days ago about it being like an iron man suit. it is a glowing, bright white power that can be incredible when wielded properly. unfortunately, people characterize it as an adversarial power that can and will take over your soul.

how about some true synergy instead of boring zero-sum people? smh. the true poetry here is that zero-sum thinking will become more of a thing of the past so there is some natural comedy with this title

Per learning from others after encountering an unfamiliar problem, I think there are rose-tinted glasses here. 90%+ of the time, either someone else had already provided the relevant answer at Stack Overflow or I could find it on a documentation page, a blog. There is no social engagement then. Just search. That also hasn't gone away, as LLMs can also provide sources to justify their answers.

Per the human element, the author is in part relaying about formative experiences from youth that you won't easily repeat, and also experiences that are not decoupled from the work as it still exists, unless you are entirely remote, which is not a LLM-specific problem.

All of which to say, the emotional element behind it is valid, but the diagnosis is off the mark. I think the human element, should it be jeopardized, is in part through the complacent convenience of remote work and disinterest in community participation. But, communities still exist, and tech communities historically were always niche. As it stands they're probably bigger now than they ever were.

There are still new frontiers with software where LLMs will be less effective. Yes, there is less friction than before for learning technologies, but all this does is move the goalpost as we can accomplish more with our time.

Instead of hacking things out through trial and error on mature stacks (with or without others), you'll be closer to the cutting edge and have different problems. Many of which will still be technological in nature.

“So leave me behind.”

That’s easy to say for someone in their 50s who built wealth under favorable conditions.

But it’s quite ignorant and inhumane to say that to someone in their 20s who is just starting their career.

Too bad to see these boomer antics continue to be perpetuated.

> These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics

Yeah yeah back to Reddit

For real though: you can keep doing artisanal hand-written code as a hobby. Just like you can still write a web server in assembly if you really want to. But that’s just not how professional software development is done anymore. Just a new tool, I don’t think it’s as deep as the author is making it out to be.

This will inevitably lead to tired discussion of “there are two types of developers, those who care about the craft and those who want to get things” done. I believe that to be a false dichotomy, and will link to someone else’s comment in another thread who makes the argument that caring about the craft is part of caring about the product.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47591796

More specifically to the submission, I’ll say I agree with the author. This “being left behind” fear mongering is an exhausting uncritical talking point. Life isn’t about rushing through the end and killing yourself to be “productive”. “Being left behind” is only bad if what’s “ahead” is an improvement to your situation, and that’s not a given. Humans aren’t built to be pushed to 11 without rest. Stopping to smell the roses is good. Immediatelly thinking “how can I kill these to package the smell to sell to others at a profit” is not.

AI is repulsive. You either feel it, maybe not immediately, or don't. When you feel it, you'll rationalize it one way or another. The rationalization does not matter that much. It's essentially arbitrary and is a product of whatever experience you've accumulated so far. (E.g. could be a Communist rationalization of alienation under capitalism.) Yet the underlying feeling is true. Stick to it.

The funniest thing about this post is that Java Android programming circa 2014 is somehow romanticized as "real programming." 2014 Android code has got to be peak corpo-slop with the most inane abstractions, unintuitive paradigms, and copy-paste boilerplate syndrome. Ironically, exactly why we need AI these days, since like 90% of the code you wrote didn't technically do anything.

> These LLMs are prediction machines. They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics, trained on the years and years of dedication by brave engineers willing to learn and build in the open. Building in the open meant we were not gatekeeping technology, but creating tangible examples for young engineers to explore, understand, and learn from.

Another grief-post with people unable to cope with the fact that the whole structure of learning and work is going to change so they resort to pseudo nostalgia and romanticism. Not to mention that "They are text generators that are ultimately a bunch of fancy statistics" is basically incorrect and belongs in 2024.

Not gonna pretend that this is anything other than the author's personal gripe with this whole thing, but this is really just the sunk cost fallacy with extra steps.

Even by trying to reassure (the reader? Himself?) that LLMs are just a tool for humans, he asserts in the final paragraph that software is no longer made by humans. Something something linotype operators.

> I desire to connect with people. I long for the days where I was vulnerable and shared my struggles with engineers who charitably stepped up to support me.

Main character syndrome. AI doesn't exist to make extroverts feel better about themselves. It's there to do the programming, no matter what humans feel about it. Please stop confusing your hobbies with the work needed to be done.