On the other hand, where I remain a skeptic is this constant banging-on that somehow this will translate into entirely new things - research, materials science, economies, inventions, etc - because that requires learning “in real time” from information sources you’re literally generating in that moment, not decades of Stack Overflow responses without context. That has been bandied about for years, with no evidence to show for it beyond specifically cherry-picked examples, often from highly-controlled environments.
I never doubted that, with competent engineers, these tools could be used to generate “new” code from past datasets. What I continue to doubt is the utility of these tools given their immense costs, both environmentally and socially.
Of course, we won't be able to tell the real effects, now, because every longitudinal study of researchers will now be corrupted by the ongoing evisceration of academic research in the current environment. Vibe-coding won't be a net creativity gain to a researcher affected by vibe-immigration-policy, vibe-grant-availability, and vibe-firings, for all of which the unpredictability is a punitive design goal.
Whether fear of LLMs taking jobs has contributed to a larger culture of fear and tribalism that has emboldened anti-intellectual movements worldwide, and what the attributable net effect on research and development will be... it's incredibly hard to quantify.
Quite literally this is what I’m trying to get at with my resistance to LLM adoption in the current environment. We’re not using it to do hard work, we’re throwing it everywhere in an intentional decision to dumb down more people and funnel resources and control into fewer hands.
Current AI isn’t democratizing anything, it’s just a shinier marketing ploy to get people to abandon skilled professions and leave the bulk of the populace only suitable for McJobs. The benefits of its use are seen by vanishingly few, while its harms felt by distressingly many.
At present, it is a tool designed to improve existing neoliberal policies and wealth pumps by reducing the demand for skilled labor without properly compensating those affected by its use, nor allowing an exit from their walled gardens (because that is literally what all these XaaS AI firms are - walled gardens of pattern matchers masquerading as intelligence).
AI code tools are allowing people to build things they couldn't before due to lack of skillset, time or budget. I’ve seen all sorts of problems solved by semi technical and even non-technical people. My brother for example built a thing with Microsoft copilot that helped automate more in his manufacturing facility (used to be paper).
But yeah, keep yelling at that cloud - the rest of us will keep shipping cool things that we couldn’t before, and faster.
I have harped on this endlessly as a non-programmer working a non-tech job, with 7 "vibe-coded" programs now being used daily by people at my company.
I am sorry, but the tech world is completely missing the forest for the trees here. LLM's are talked about purely as tools that were created to help devs. Some love them, some hate them, but pretty much all of them seem unaware that LLMs allow non-tech people to automate tasks with a computer without having to go through a 3rd-party-created interface.
So yea, maybe Claude is useless troubleshooting your cloud platform. But it certainly isn't useless in helping me forgo a cloud platform by setting up a simple local database to use instead.