zlacker

>>tablet+(OP)
I like Thomas, but I find his arguments include the same fundamental mistake I see made elsewhere. He acknowledged that the tools need an expert to use properly, and as he illustrated, he refined his expertise over many years. He is of the first and last generation of experienced programmers who learned without LLM assistance. How is someone just coming out of school going to get the encouragement and space to independently develop the experience they need to break out of the "vibe coding" phase? I can almost anticipate an interjection along the lines of "well we used to build everything with our hands and now we have tools etc, it's just different" but this is an order of magnitude different. This is asking a robot to design and assemble a shed for you, and you never even see the saw, nails, and hammer being used, let alone understand enough about how the different materials interact to get much more than a "vibe" for how much weight the roof might support.

>>parado+4u
> I like Thomas, but I find his arguments include the same fundamental mistake I see made elsewhere

Some of the arguments in the article are so bizarre that I can’t believe they’re anything other than engagement bait.

Claiming that IP rights shouldn’t matter because some developers pirate TV shows? Blaming LLM hallucinations on the programming language?

I agree with the general sentiment of the article, but it feels like the author decided to go full ragebait/engagement bait mode with the article instead of trying to have a real discussion. It’s weird to see this language on a company blog.

I think he knows that he’s ignoring the more complex and nuanced debates about LLMs because that’s not what the article is about. It’s written in inflammatory style that sets up straw man talking points and then sort of knocks them down while giving weird excuses for why certain arguments should be ignored.

>>Aurorn+fw
They are not engagement bait. That argument, in particular, survived multiple rounds of reviews with friends outside my team who do not fully agree with me about this stuff. It's a deeply sincere, and, I would say for myself, earned take on this.

A lot of people are misunderstanding the goal of the post, which is not necessarily to persuade them, but rather to disrupt a static, unproductive equilibrium of uninformed arguments about how this stuff works. The commentary I've read today has to my mind vindicated that premise.

>>tptace+sx
> That argument, in particular, survived multiple rounds of reviews with friends outside my team who do not fully agree with me about this stuff. It's a deeply sincere, and, I would say for myself, earned take on this.

Which argument? The one dismissing all arguments about IP on the grounds that some software engineers are pirates?

That argument is not only unpersuasive, it does a disservice to the rest of the post and weakens its contribution by making you as the author come off as willfully inflammatory and intentionally blind to nuance, which does the opposite of breaking the unproductive equilibrium. It feeds the sense that those in the skeptics camp have that AI adopters are intellectually unserious.

I know that you know that the law and ethics of IP are complicated, that the "profession" is diverse and can't be lumped into a cohesive unit for summary dismissal, and that there are entirely coherent ethical stances that would call for both piracy in some circumstances and condemnation of IP theft in others. I've seen enough of your work to know that dismissing all that nuance with a flippant call to "shove this concern up your ass" is beneath you.

>>lolind+lE
> The one dismissing all arguments about IP on the grounds that some software engineers are pirates?

Yeah... this was a really, incredibly horseshit argument. I'm all for a good rant, but goddamn, man, this one wasn't good. I would say "I hope the reputational damage was worth whatever he got out of it", but I figure he's been able to retire at any time for a while now, so that sort of stuff just doesn't matter anymore to him.

>>simonc+NZ
I love how many people have in response to this article tried to intimate that writing it put my career in jeopardy; so forcefully do they disagree with a technical piece that it must somehow be career-limiting.

>>tptace+YZ
It's just such a mind-meltingly bad argument, man.

"A whole bunch of folks ignore copyright terms, so all complaints that 'Inhaling most-to-all of the code that can be read on the Internet with the intent to make a proprietary machine that makes a ton of revenue for the owner of that machine and noone else is probably bad, and if not a violation of the letter of the law, surely a violation of its spirit.' are invalid."

When I hear someone sincerely say stuff that works out to "Software licenses don't matter, actually.", I strongly reduce my estimation of their ability to reason well and behave ethically. Does this matter? Probably not. There are many folks in the field who hold that sort of opinion, so it's relatively easy to surround yourself with likeminded folks. Do you hold these sorts of opinions? Fuck if I know. All I know about is what you wrote today.

Anyway. As I mentioned, you're late-career in what seems to be a significantly successful career, so your reputation absolutely doesn't matter, and all this chatter is irrelevant to you.