Abide Coding
A corporation is pivoting to AI and in this dreck-filled regression it needs talent – ignore the fact that it had been laying off and/or losing people to attrition without replacing them – to develop that tooling. “The best thing you can do right now is open search the arxiv and search a topic you’re interested in. Then do the research, check the example code, and play around with it.”
Did they mean reading proposals like this: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.
Regarding ethical considerations, participants who were in the Brain-only group reported higher satisfaction and demonstrated higher brain connectivity, compared to other groups.
“Brain-only group.” I like that term. This whole email newsletter is meant to be a brain-only exercise.
I’m at the age where cognitive decline starts becoming a real possibility while also being at the point in my tech-adjacent career when my age becomes a liability. I find myself torn between those two states. I have always been adaptable and curious, driven by novelty, yet I see the push to AI agents and ‘vibe coding’ and it’s superficially that thing that I do, yet bereft of any critical thinking, free of learning, no eureka moments, no flow states, nor any creativity to it. And the results are not even good. It’s just going to make me dependent on the tool and it’s not going to slow my mental degradation.
The Hidden Cost of AI Coding – Terrible Software
When we outsource the parts of programming that used to demand our complete focus and creativity, do we also outsource the opportunity for satisfaction? Can we find the same fulfillment in prompt engineering that we once found in problem-solving through code?
Generative AI runs on gambling addiction — just one more prompt, bro! (pivot-to-ai)
This is why you see previously normal techies start evangelising AI coding on LinkedIn or Hacker News like they saw a glimpse of God and they’ll keep paying for the chatbot tokens until they can just see a glimpse of Him again. And you have to as well. This is why they act like they joined a cult.
If you’re an experienced developer you might be able to massage your first few attempts into something workable (so long as the problem is generic enough to have been sucked up wholesale from stackoverflow.) There’s some utility to that, I admit, though that utility benefits from that experience. If you start replacing your junior devs with prompts, if you only learn new libraries and APIs via LLMs, if you don’t credibly debug and scrutinize everything, you’re left with a tool that has increasingly diminishing returns. It will be disastrous for junior devs.
Yet, again, being more senior allows me more breathing room to weather the storm. I am catching up, hesitant, to some of the tooling. I do not believe in it. My only motivation is to stay ahead of the sword of Damocles these AI evangelists are placing, the ones that are writing Vibe code or retire (infoworld) or Vibe Coding Is Coming for Engineering Jobs (wired or archive.ph.) I have a family now. I need to embrace the tool chain for job security. I need to ride it out somehow. I need to abide.
Others are more pragmatic about it. I think: maybe I am the one that’s nuts.
My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts · The Fly Blog
LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google. They look things up themselves. Most importantly, they don’t get tired; they’re immune to inertia.
Then I have a conversation with another tech lead working with LLMs and I come back to the conclusion: no, I am not. This shit is nuts. Those defenses of vibe coding and agentic systems and all the related workflows come from a purely objectivist point of view. There is no bigger proof of this than the above opinion piece having this very massive caveat:
Important caveat: I’m discussing only the implications of LLMs for software development. For art, music, and writing? I got nothing. I’m inclined to believe the skeptics in those fields. I just don’t believe them about mine.
WHY NOT? What makes software so special and unique?
Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans.
Ah. The prevalent Silicon Valley attitude of the last 20+ years! A professional software developer only deals with practicalities. Code, and by proxy all computing, is a logical enterprise free of the biases of the world. Information and data guides software, algorithms rule, everything is quantifiable, and everything can be optimized.
It’s nonsense. Artisan or not, we are human, and if you’re solving “problems for people” with code you are a human working on things that have human consequences, even if that work is very low in the rung of corporate decision making. And this is not some hypothetical! Less than a month ago some guy from Nvidia vibe coded updates to Linux LTS kernels which resulted in open vulnerabilities for three weeks and then, apparently this is not even a joke, disappeared and went to present at a conference about how AI enhances kernel development (twitter).
Even ignoring the broader issues of authorship, accountability (me), trust, plagiarism, and general approval processes (lwn), the immediate consequence of this LLM assisted efficiency was a month of headaches for end users, headaches for testers and debuggers, and headaches for the people that had to patch out this vulnerability. One computer minute of LLM patching resulted in man-days of “brain-only” fixing. This is not efficient!
That’s why there’s an ethical and moral imperative to resist its encroachment into our work. Sabotage it. Slow it. Use it in a way that gives directors headaches. Stay accountable to your work and your brain. And maybe, just maybe, if we abide code our way through it and manage to keep our jobs then one day there’ll be a windfall for those still in the brain-only group to come back and fix all the mess.
Either that or we’re all fucked. Regardless of which happens, dude, abide.
Related Links
‘Headed for technofascism’: the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley (guardian)
This type of coverage accelerated as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs began turning from hardware to software. As the tech journalist Dave Kaplan wrote at the time, software “needed neither factory to build nor natural resources to mine – just [the] brain matter” of the entrepreneur behind the company.
Does she feel she is being “left behind”, as AI enthusiasts would say? “No, not at all. My reaction to that is, ‘Where’s everybody going?’” She laughs as if to say: nowhere good.
AI Signals The Death Of The Author - NOEMA
All this throws up something that has been missed in the frenzy over the technological significance of LLMs: They are philosophically significant. What we now have are things that write without speaking, a proliferation of texts that do not have, nor are beholden to, the authoritative voice of an author, and statements whose truth cannot be anchored in and assured by a prior intention to say something.
A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts | The New Yorker (archive.ph)
A.I. is a technology of averages: large language models are trained to spot patterns across vast tracts of data; the answers they produce tend toward consensus, both in the quality of the writing, which is often riddled with clichés and banalities, and in the calibre of the ideas. Other, older technologies have aided and perhaps enfeebled writers, of course—one could say the same about, say, SparkNotes or a computer keyboard. But with A.I. we’re so thoroughly able to outsource our thinking that it makes us more average, too.
What’s Happening to Reading? | The New Yorker (archive.ph)
There’s something both diffuse and concentrated about reading now; it involves a lot of random words flowing across a screen, while the lurking presence of YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix, and the like insures that, once we’ve begun to read, we must continually choose not to stop.
Listen to this
Enough about vibe coding, more plain old vibes please. One of my favourite albums of 2024 was the debut album from LA “supergroup” Puli: Swirling. Gonna be honest, though I know some of the labels associated, I did not know of any of the members. Or I thought I didn’t. After listening to the album a few times I realized the name Damon Palermo rang a bell and after a quick discogs search I realized he went by Magic Touch and produced one of my favourite tracks of 2011, the house throwback disco-sampling anthem Clubhouse, on what was the initial, and fantastic, batch of 100% Silk release.
That’s an aside and a very different kind of vibe than the track Cloudy by Puli; an electro-accoustic slow jam with ethereal vocals that just makes you want to go to the beach, relax in the water, and forget about this AI shit forever. Been listening to it a lot lately. Also that sad crab artwork
https://openspaceworld.bandcamp.com/track/a3-cloudy
Hope you have a happy Canadian or USA independence day, sometimes.