It's not even always a more efficient form of labour. I've experienced many scenarios with AI where prompting it to do the right thing takes longer and requires writing/reading more text compared to writing the code myself.
Agreed. Programming languages are not ambiguous. Human language is very ambiguous, so if I'm writing something with a moderate level of complexity, it's going to take longer to describe what I want to the AI vs writing it myself. Reviewing what an AI writes also takes much longer than reviewing my own code.
AI is getting better at picking up some important context from other code or documentation in a project, but it's still miles away from what it needs to be, and the needed context isn't always present.
> They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.
You can use AI to write all your code, but if you want to be a programmer and can't see that the code is pretty mid then you should work on improving your own programming skills.
People have been saying the 6 month thing for years now, and while I do see it improving in breadth, quality/depth still appears to be plateauing.
It's okay if you don't want to be a programmer though, you can be a manager and let AI do an okay job at being your programmer. You better be driven to be a good at manager though. If you're not... then AI can do an okay job of replacing you there too.
Claude requires many lifetimes worth of data to "learn". Evolution aside humans don't require much data to learn, and our learning happens in real-time in response to our environment.
Train Claude without the programming dataset and give it a dozen of the best programming books, it'll have no chance of writing a compiler. Do the same for a human with an interest in learning to program and there's a good chance.
Here's a potentially more uncomfortable thought, if all people through history with potential for "true intelligence" had a tool that did 99% of everything do you think they would've had motivation to learn enough of that 99% to give insight into the yet discovered.
I wouldn't say I need to invent much that is strictly novel, though I often iterate on what exists and delve into novel-ish territory. That being said I'm definitely in a minority where I have the luxury/opportunity to work outside the monotony of average programming.
The part I find concerning is that I wouldn't be in the place I am today without spending a fair amount of time in that monotony and really delving in to understand it and slowly push outside it's boundary. If I was starting programming today I can confidently say I would've given up.
I highly recommend everyone involved in web development to read at least a small proportion of the horrors that are the HTML parser specification. It will leave you yearning for the return of XHTML.
Or you could also read web proposals where the reason for avoiding the ideal implementation is complication of updating HTML parser rules.
Or attempt to use the web features that are already hindered by the HTML parser (custom element table rows).
Grateful in part, but I can't help to think that if there was refusal to build parsers for an outlandish spec in the first place then we'd have fixed the problem by now.
Using existing parsers only hides the poor design up to a point.
I mostly agree with the sentiment, I'd rather have simple parsers and sensible specs, but I'm also happy they do whatever it takes not to break anything (well, they are breaking XSLT…)
Ads aren't a long-term viable model for tools. Each year it gets more feasible to self host tools (email being the od exception, but there are still many ad free alternatives). Ads shifting vehicles to AI will extend the lifetime a bit, but even still local models are getting better and that's without even much architectural advancement.
I don't see an end to advertising all together though, public spaces and entertainment don't really have an escape unless forced by regulation.
This very much reminds me how the earliest users get a bit screwed due to high costs and low quality. Maybe these users are caused enthusiasts, so they don't care. The next set of users get higher quality and lower costs. These are your big winners in the timeline of a technology.
The middle users get benefits, but aren't treated quite like the previous set.
Then you have your late adopters, these are the ones that are lightly abused, but they get a mature product, so it isn't that bad.
Finally you have your last users. These are milked for every drop. They have irrational loyalty or are locked in.
I imagine AI will follow this trend and we are entering past those middle users as we speak. Seeing how little difference there was between GPT 3.5 and 4, and how computationally expensive 4.5 was, I think we've hit the end. Now its just how many prompts do you want to run for COT/Thinking?
GPT 5.2 is cheap and they are proposing ads. They see the end is near and need to capture profit before local models take over.
I'm not so sure. Much like search engines, you can run one yourself or pay Kagi but most people prefer to keep their money and deal with the ads. Streaming services have demonstrated that people have a pretty high tolerance for ads.
Search so far has not been overly pushy with ads. It's easy enough to gain the instinct of scrolling down after each search. There's little incentive for people to seek out an ad free alternative.
That changes with local AI though. There is now incentive to integrate and further develop self hosted search. You can see it happening on AI services already, using their own internal search engines for better reasoning and more accurate results.
I suspect Google's censorship and intentional worsening of search results to increase traffic would've been enough on its own to eventually drive people to self hosted search as it became trivial to setup.
Streaming entertainment is different, there's usually no legal alternatives. Either you pay extra for no ads, or you put up with the ads. You could easily say that streaming services have demonstrated that people don't have a high tolerance for ads as well. One of the major drivers to streaming from cable TV was the lack of ads at the time.
It's not even always a more efficient form of labour. I've experienced many scenarios with AI where prompting it to do the right thing takes longer and requires writing/reading more text compared to writing the code myself.
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