The thing I hate the most about AI and it’s ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul—brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots. […]
There was once magic here. There was once madness.
Kids would stay up all night on IRC with bloodshot eyes, trying to render a cube in OpenGL without segfaulting their future. They cared. They would install Gentoo on a toaster just to see if it’d boot. They knew the smell of burnt voltage regulators and the exact line of assembly where Doom hit 10 FPS on their calculator. These were artists. They wrote code like jazz musicians—full of rage, precision, and divine chaos.
Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to “review this AI-generated patchset” for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.
Unusually well-written piece on the threat AI poses to programming as an art form.
I get when people say: “hey, this happened with every new tech…” But this one in particular gas many inherent problems: it’s built on stolen material, it doesn’t encourage critical thinking and it will create mini socio cognitive bubbles, distancing each other more and more. It’s built that way because the people that makes it want it to be like that.
You lose me at stolen. If we are talking code anyway.
Of all the arguments against AI this is not one of them that holds any water. Copyright is bullshit and AI proved it in a very visceral way.
Plenty of good reasons to hate AI besides Intellectual Property.
We have laws out the ass for every stupid thing. Bureaucracy so heavy that it prevents many people from even attempting to compete. AI is the first realistic means of bypassing it, its going to be a renaissance of innovation and productivity from the bottom up. You worry about Disney movies being displaced and intellectual property being breached, but we won’t need corporations like Disney when this matures.
“AI is the first realistic means of bypassing [laws and bureaucracy]”
Huge disagreement on all fronts.
The AI companies state in their Terms of Service broadly that users have commercial rights to their prompt outputs, and can even copyright them - while also keeping the output for their own data naturally. It doesn’t bypass laws or bureaucracy… At all. Rather its the billionaires trying to steal all creative arts, coding, and any other industry works they can manage - and package into their “same but slightly different” slop that outcompetes the original creators - with no protection given to those creators whose original has been copied without any kind of compensation or agreement. Its another wealth transfer.
One of many problems the article points out - they don’t invent anything, it’s all just regurgitations of past work. This is the path of stagnation, not innovation.
Not all AI is made equally. There are locally-run Apache licensed LLMs.