johnwheeler

Hard pass.

I appreciate the honesty here. He talks about how programming became part of his identity, how being good at it earned him respect, and how it gave him a sense that he was providing something valuable.

But here’s the deal:

1. The world does not give two fucks about our need to feel a certain way. 2. AI is not going anywhere.

The world ultimately cares about the value you provide. I think it’s deeply egotistical to believe that when someone hires you, part of the arrangement is that they’re supposed to preserve your sense of superiority because you possess some skill other people don’t.

For a long time, intelligence and specialized knowledge created scarcity. Increasingly, they don’t. Raw intellectual capability is becoming a commodity, and a lot of the gatekeeping built around it is disappearing.

What matters more now is taste. Judgment. Knowing what is worth building. Having the will to push something valuable into the world. Knowing when something is good, when it isn’t, and what needs to happen next.

I’ve worked with too many people over the years who made terrible decisions for no reason other than that the alternative bruised their ego or threatened their livelihood. Ironically, these were often the same people who prided themselves on being rational and objective. In reality, they were anything but.

That’s one of the things I find so compelling about AI. It strips away a lot of the mythology around being the smartest person in the room and highlights what I’ve always believed matters most:

Did you create value?

Not your identity. Not your status. Not your need to feel special.

The value you actually put into the world.

It's not worse than the man. It's better. You're just trying to protect your ego. It's ridiculous.

Even better, "hey, chat GPT, list my branches by commit date."

I know that's not a popular answer, but I'm just trying to demonstrate the reality that this kind of knowledge isn't specialized anymore.

It's not a struggling company. I run an e-commerce website. I give people the option to use either Stripe or PayPal. I would say it's a 50 50 split. The company is making $5 billion in profit a year. What's wrong with people?

The thing is, is it's not a subjective thing. It's objectively bad. I think that's what the story is or the appeal of the post. It's calling out, something that everyone else thinks is so great, but it's actually really pretty bad compared to the competition. Trust me, I used to want Claude to win, but it's not.

I don't know why this comment's getting down voted. It's absolutely true. I would also add that Anthropic seems to limit, compute, the more you use it because I'm on the Max subscription, and it just stops working for me.

I'll ask it to do something and it'll say, I tried, but I couldn't do it over and over again or some variation of.

But it doesn't do that at the start of my subscription, so...

This article misses the point. It assumes that the way business is currently done will be the way business is always done, but the LLM revolution aims to replace businesses that have these types of constraints sure initially it will work with them, but soon enough scrappy codebases will come out that hold their own and stand the test of time with LLMs at the helm

looks expensive