Armin was once one of the most prolific programmers in Python.
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Armin was once one of the most prolific programmers in Python. Says he never writes code anymore. Seeing more and more people like him write stuff like this on what are supposedly computer programming forums. https://lobste.rs/s/qmjejh/ai_is_slowly_munching_away_my_passion#c_jcgdju
Notably, once a person crosses this threshold, I see them still hang out on programming forums, but they never talk about any of the puzzles of programming anymore. Only about running agents. Which feels strange and sad. Why hang out on the forums at all then?
@cwebber The original linked article here is a really good read.
https://whynot.fail/human/ai-is-slowly-munching-away-my-passion/ -
@cwebber What's telling, I think, is that all these people go on about how much they're doing and how great AI is to help them build more *but there's no actual demonstrable stuff being done.* I mean, if AI was some kind of Nx multiplier you'd think we'd be getting N times more actual functionality out of software but mostly it seems like the N multiplier only applies to blog posts about how AI multiplies their programming.
@wordshaper @cwebber every line of code is a liability. it's funny that suddenly "lines of code generated" is a metric and they're all smiling, proud.
meanwhile... some AWS agent decided to rewrite half the code base on its own and deploy it to production which took down some important AWS services.
we'll just keep generating more, faster. tech debt creation at scale.
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@cwebber identity, community, established relationships, safety of a known space?
(I don't know this individual, answering in the general sense)
@cwebber on reflection, "I am no longer a part of community X" is probably a big step for hearts to take, even when original criteria for membership are no longer met
Even when humans stray FAR from a community, I think they can identify/feel it quite differently! ("I'm the only remaining true member of community X")
Yes X is a wryly amusing placeholder to me rn lol
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@cwebber What's telling, I think, is that all these people go on about how much they're doing and how great AI is to help them build more *but there's no actual demonstrable stuff being done.* I mean, if AI was some kind of Nx multiplier you'd think we'd be getting N times more actual functionality out of software but mostly it seems like the N multiplier only applies to blog posts about how AI multiplies their programming.
@wordshaper @cwebber I don't think you appreciate just how many man years go into writing production level code. My productivity has tripled but if takes weeks to get a prototype in front of 100k+ users. Is not like we're going to release clawd and watch the world burn
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Armin was once one of the most prolific programmers in Python. Says he never writes code anymore. Seeing more and more people like him write stuff like this on what are supposedly computer programming forums. https://lobste.rs/s/qmjejh/ai_is_slowly_munching_away_my_passion#c_jcgdju
Notably, once a person crosses this threshold, I see them still hang out on programming forums, but they never talk about any of the puzzles of programming anymore. Only about running agents. Which feels strange and sad. Why hang out on the forums at all then?
@cwebber yeah, even without my and many others’ objections to LLMs, it’s depressing to read about someone essentially giving up a skill.
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Very nice! I have watched experienced devs have to work at this too. They often lean towards overcomplicating things because they want to avoid hardcoding the patterns. But this then leads to a nice little discussion.
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@cwebber Also, don't use it for "summarize" because it literally can't do that.
When ChatGPT summarises, it actually does nothing of the kind.
One of the use cases I thought was reasonable to expect from ChatGPT and Friends (LLMs) was summarising. It turns out I was wrong. What ChatGPT isn't summarising at all, it only looks like it. What it does is something else and that something else only becomes summarising in very specific circumstances.
R&A IT Strategy & Architecture (ea.rna.nl)
@jwcph @cwebber Also see “ChatGPT trust is risky, as a recent study by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) shows. The association of 68 public broadcasters from 56 countries systematically tested the reliability of the most popular AI systems. The alarming result: ChatGPT, Gemini, and other chatbots invent up to 40 percent of their answers and present them as facts.”
EBU – European Broadcasting Union (2025) News Integrity in AI Assistants. An international PSM study, https://www.ebu.ch/Report/MIS-BBC/NI_AI_2025.pdf
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R relay@relay.an.exchange shared this topic
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@wordshaper @cwebber I don't think you appreciate just how many man years go into writing production level code. My productivity has tripled but if takes weeks to get a prototype in front of 100k+ users. Is not like we're going to release clawd and watch the world burn
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I have my fifth graders write a program that will convert decimal numbers to Roman numerals. They know that there are already webpages that do this with smart trim programs that always give the right answer. They know they could ask an LLM and probably get the right answers most of the time.
They still want to solve the puzzle.
"It works! It works!"
I've love hearing that when I'm teaching.
I feel sad that some people don't get that "it works it works" feeling anymore. That's depressing. Honestly what is the point of going on even?
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Feeling FOMO about AI? Well here's my advice!
Stay on top of what's happening. Which doesn't really require *using* the tools. Just see what people are doing.
Whether or not you do use it, stay a practitioner. And don't fall for the FOMO.
Your career won't end because you're not making the choice to use AI. (If your employer makes you use it, that's another thing.)
If you use AI, use it for "summarize and explore" tasks. DO NOT use it for *generate* tasks. That's a different thing.
If you want to differentiate yourself, *learning skills* is the differentiation space right now.
These things are easy to pick up. You can do it whenever. But keep learning.
If you see generated examples, don't paste or accept them. Type them in by hand! The hands on imperative: actually trying things congeals core ideas.
And if it doesn't help your career... well, your consolation prize is: you'll stay interesting.
@cwebber so, just do the thing using AI as tutor/supporter - not a s a slave, who makes all instead of you. By this way we learn other things much faster.
This is my experience. -
@cwebber @jalefkowit in Armin's case specifically, a not-insubstantial part of the answer seems to be sneering at people who don't use "AI" (including here on Mastodon)
That's not a very charitable read, but I have run out of charity for the way he has performed his enthusiasm to the community
I'm seeing the same thing in some of the Python spaces I inhabit. The users who go all-in on it stop talking about programming.
@SnoopJ @cwebber @jalefkowit I wouldn't mind so much if they just stopped talking about programming, it is the downstream detritus of their activities that makes ME stop talking about programming that pisses me off
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@wordshaper @cwebber every line of code is a liability. it's funny that suddenly "lines of code generated" is a metric and they're all smiling, proud.
meanwhile... some AWS agent decided to rewrite half the code base on its own and deploy it to production which took down some important AWS services.
we'll just keep generating more, faster. tech debt creation at scale.
@agentultra @wordshaper @cwebber in my experience there have always been a faction of software engineers who think LOC is a valid metric
A peer of mine once said "You're going there? Sure, then. Give me a couple days and I'll unroll all my for loops," but nobody considers that.
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Steve Klabnik also had an interview on lobste.rs. There's a lot in it! It's a cool read! https://alexalejandre.com/programming/steve-klabnik-interview/
And then it gets to the AI part and he's just like "oh I don't write code anymore".
And notably Steve Klabnik has a lot to say about code, but it's *all in the past*.
Lots of brilliant people are becoming non-practitioners.
@cwebber@social.coop Eh. At least he's honest?
A lot of people would present code generated by AI as "I made it".
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Also, I think using hosted models is strictly unethical for surveillance and energy usage reasons.
It *is* true that there are models you can run locally that are much, much more efficient, and I suspect the energy costs on training them can be dramatically reduced.
I don't use either presently, but using a local model to help you navigate a codebase (as opposed to generating code) is a very different thing, I think. But it's also not what most people are doing!
And hosted AI models, as I said, I think are fully objectionable from an ethics perspective.
Datacenters are an antipattern in the general case. AI datacenters, triply so.
@cwebber my impression was that small datacenters are probably better for the environment than local computing because they’re more efficient, although i could see there being economic and political downsides. but i haven’t researched the topic deeply.
perhaps this is a theory and practice thing—in our political and economic reality i could see there being a lot of issues that real-world data centers have that a hypothetical one designed for environmental and human welfare wouldn’t.
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Armin was once one of the most prolific programmers in Python. Says he never writes code anymore. Seeing more and more people like him write stuff like this on what are supposedly computer programming forums. https://lobste.rs/s/qmjejh/ai_is_slowly_munching_away_my_passion#c_jcgdju
Notably, once a person crosses this threshold, I see them still hang out on programming forums, but they never talk about any of the puzzles of programming anymore. Only about running agents. Which feels strange and sad. Why hang out on the forums at all then?
@cwebber I have used llms for generation when it's something I should remember how to do but don't. Like I don't remember the exact name of the method I want or the order of the arguments.
It produced code that I was able to understand, since I knew in general what I wanted to do, and fixing the parts it got wrong was faster than writing the whole thing from scratch.
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Steve Klabnik also had an interview on lobste.rs. There's a lot in it! It's a cool read! https://alexalejandre.com/programming/steve-klabnik-interview/
And then it gets to the AI part and he's just like "oh I don't write code anymore".
And notably Steve Klabnik has a lot to say about code, but it's *all in the past*.
Lots of brilliant people are becoming non-practitioners.
@cwebber Some of the big names in the rust community are very bullish on AI. This has actually changed how I feel about rust.
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Armin was once one of the most prolific programmers in Python. Says he never writes code anymore. Seeing more and more people like him write stuff like this on what are supposedly computer programming forums. https://lobste.rs/s/qmjejh/ai_is_slowly_munching_away_my_passion#c_jcgdju
Notably, once a person crosses this threshold, I see them still hang out on programming forums, but they never talk about any of the puzzles of programming anymore. Only about running agents. Which feels strange and sad. Why hang out on the forums at all then?
@cwebber It is sad and I wonder why it is not more widely recognized in free software circles as going fundamentally against what brought us here: hacking the good hack and sharing knowledge.
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Also, I think using hosted models is strictly unethical for surveillance and energy usage reasons.
It *is* true that there are models you can run locally that are much, much more efficient, and I suspect the energy costs on training them can be dramatically reduced.
I don't use either presently, but using a local model to help you navigate a codebase (as opposed to generating code) is a very different thing, I think. But it's also not what most people are doing!
And hosted AI models, as I said, I think are fully objectionable from an ethics perspective.
Datacenters are an antipattern in the general case. AI datacenters, triply so.
@cwebber i don't know that i'd trust these models for summarization or navigation. even when the outputs are technically correct, they can leave out certain information or frame the information in a misleading way, papering over whatever makes the code unique and materially suited for the task at hand
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I don't really get how one could use an LLM to help with coding without reading the code?
That's baffling. But I don't make apps I teach young people to think and solve problems. So maybe that's why I don't get it.
@futurebird @cwebber Interesting thought actually. Why bother having an LLM generate source code or a script you cannot read? Instruct the LLM to generate the app in low level machine instructions, produce an executable, and skip all the overhead.
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A solution that 5th graders can complete
elegant? eh
print("Roman Numerals")
ones = ["","I","II", "III", "IV", "V","VI", "VII", "VIII", "IX"]
tens = ["", "X", "XX","XXX", "XL", "L", "LX", "LXX", "LXXX", "XC"]
hundreds = ["", "C", "CC", "CCC", "CD", "D", "DC", "DCC", "DCC", "CM"]
thousands = ["", "M", "MM", "MMM"]n = input("enter a number 1 to 3999")
n=int(n)m=n//1000
n=n-m*1000h=n//100
n=n-h*100t=n//10
n=n-t*10print(thousands[m]+hundreds[h]+tens[t]+ones[n])
@futurebird @faassen @cwebber Hmm, I see how this has some interesting advantages over using to/from Hex as the challenge. Cool!
