draftsman

Have you ever done RuneScape’s quests? No way an AI could create something so original

Scratching my head too. The thing is, the industry as whole is enabling this type of behavior

Saying you do those things when it’s AI doing them for you is akin to saying I cooked a meal while picking up fast food in a drive through line.

That is where a lot of people in tech believe things are headed, executives in particular. Fully autonomous AI-driven codebases. “Dark factories.” One agent generating a plan, one writing the code, one responsible for testing and validating, and one to orchestrate the rest. The idea is software development will follow in the footsteps of physical manufacturing and eventually become fully automated. I think one huge flaw with this belief/comparison is that the automated assembly line is deterministic. LLMs and AI agents are not. Every Tacoma made on the Toyota assembly line is made from the same blueprint. There are no robots deciding on-the-fly whether to use a laser weld or an adhesive, what material to use for a specific component, etc. Now think about how LLMs build software. No matter how strict a harness or detailed spec you give it, it will always make decisions. That is what makes it “agentic” after all.

Not trying to come at you, but what is stopping you from educating the juniors at your company?

Writing code without an LLM is akin to cooking a meal yourself, as opposed to something in between hiring a private chef and pulling a slot machine lever. When I cook a meal for myself or my loved ones, I become deeply familiar with the ingredients and the recipe. I am a good cook. Every decision, small and large, I make myself. Using feedback, I can tweak the components and the process. However, if I order food and call it my own creation, I’ll be speechless when my nut-allergic friend asks me if I used peanut oil or olive oil. And does it taste good? The end result is subjective, not binary, like your three similes. What if the food sucks? Must I now micromanage the chef? I don’t want to make them cook it again and again, hoping each time it’ll taste little more like how I want it to. I’d rather just cook it myself; I am a good cook, afterall.

Specifically, AI loves to separate headers with //

May I ask, is the hypermobility disorder you refer to EDS? If so, what was the injury?

You’ve either willfully ignored the point, or completely missed it as it flew over your head. AI wants to replace “your friend” completely.

I find very little joy in trying to wrangle the blackboxes that are LLMs. The undeterministic nature of them frustrates me, and feels nothing like the software engineering I know and love. However, I know I’m in the minority here, as almost everyone else in the industry I’ve talked to seems to love using them.

Do you find joy in using LLMs to write software? I tried using Claude/Cursor/CodeX/etc. for personal projects and experimentation, and I found no joy in it. I learned nothing, and when my MVPs were complete, I only had a shallow understanding of how the code that powered them worked.

And there’s good reason for that. Anthropic, OpenAI, Salesforce, and so on have aggressively marketed LLMs as better than humans at working. It’s no surprise when we find out something is build using an LLM, we expect it to match the marketing.

Do you have a source for your “millions” claim? Every source I can find says there are somewhere between 60 and 70 thousand immigrants currently in detention centers, based on internal ICE data. That’s still a fuck-ton of people to cage up, there’s no need to hyperbolize.

> More productivity means fewer people are required.

Required for what? If your goal is growth, and AI really is improving productivity of every employees that uses it, then why would you fire anyone?

Unfortunately I think we’ll see more and more of this as companies continue to encourage their employees to use LLMs everywhere and for everything. Eventually they will have to come to terms with the cost of such mandates, and it’s either ask your employees to “use AI less,” or it’s let some percentage go and continue to let the rest burn tokens.