Sorry I don't have an informed take on Ptacek's blog post, but I have no interest in reading it. I started to, but it's juvenile, entitled, snide, and rambling. It's like being insulted by a jr highschooler who's not half as smart as he thinks he is. I'm opting out. He should have had an LLM write it.
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@jenniferplusplus I read farther. It's very "I don't care what the empirical evidence says about outcomes or impacts, I have my feels and only a jerk would bring up facts that conflict with them." IP issues are explicitly blown off. Job loss issues are explicitly blown off. I didn't get to the end, but model collapse, environmental inpacts, and facism-enabling had not been mentioned yet at all. As if they are too trivial to bother with. It's deeply unserious. Just someone who likes what they like while annoyed that others are acting on different priorities than they do.
@cczona @jenniferplusplus i think the thing that killed me is how he blow off the "security and operational mistakes" part by just... "Review it ofc".
Totally missing the points the skeptics make, which is that we have no evidence we can efficiently and effectively review it. That review would lead to good outcomes
And we have a growing body of evidence that review doesn't work for this...
But that one is. Never. Addressed.
@Di4na @jenniferplusplus and there is already evidence emerging that engineers who depend on LLMs to write their code for them are eroding their skills. I would analogize it to early stage dementia. The person can't see how their judgement is gradually developing fissures that compromise their ability to function. Eventually it will become too clear to deny anymore. But right now they are increasingly impaired while no less confident in the comprehensiveness of their skills. It's the period when they present a big risk to self and others, because of the growing gap between reality and perception of competence. This person is letting LLMs draft most of their code, and fails to see that not continuing to hone their own skills as an active coder has personal consequences; and that doing so en masse poses societal consequences. What happens in a generation when there are virtually no engineers left who can review a LLM's outputs competently?
Actually, I take it back: I have one opinion. If AI evangelist don't like how people react to being evangelized, they can just stop doing it.
And then we can have that rational discussion they claim to want.
But this isnt that.
@jenniferplusplus I got to "open source takes jobs", with a link to a random shower thought on YCombinator with perhaps the wrongest take I've ever seen.
