Post by @urlyman@mastodon.social

2026-05-23 09:20 UTC

There are blokes my kind of age and blokes younger than me salivating at looking more powerful as prompt engineers (alchemists). Seems to me they are overwhelmingly blokes. (The key is the ‘powerful’ bit.) I see the LLM game. And I want no part of it. I will inevitably touch its greasy surfaces and co-opt some of its utility. But I am consciously curating my mitigation of that: asymptotically aspiring to #zuzai

Replies (4)

@urlyman@mastodon.social 2026-05-23 09:22

…That’s my best attempt at a policy statement for swimming in the shit that’s yet to come. Hence pinning it

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@GezThePez@mastodon.scot 2026-05-23 09:44

@urlyman@mastodon.social what will be interesting is when they try and actually commercialise the software (if they get that far). They will realise that the ai tools can’t do certain things for them to harden the application and the code repositories.

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@ApostateEnglishman@mastodon.world 2026-05-23 09:54

@urlyman@mastodon.social Agreed. The illusion of competence also appeals to mediocre individuals who don't want to put in the hard work to attain real competence. I've seen folks manage to convince themselves that it's their wizardry as prompt engineers that gets the results - as if being able to describe things in your native language is now a special talent. 🙄

Open ##5189827
@marjolica@social.linux.pizza 2026-05-23 13:08

@urlyman@mastodon.social alchemy inevitably failed. It simply wasn't possible to turn base metal into gold*. All they ever made was fool's gold. * Short of resorting to sub-nuclear physics and even with that not in useful quantities.

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