2025-04-26 23:05 UTC
Replies (40)
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@bob@epicyon.libreserver.org 2025-04-26 23:13
@jimbob@aus.social This is like in the olden days when some people could use wizards to generate code, but were stumped if they wanted something that wizards couldn't generate.
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@JustinDerrick@mstdn.ca 2025-04-26 23:47
@jimbob@aus.social My sincere hope is that AI is exposed for the wasteful fraud it proves itself to be (over and over) before it ruins large segments of the economy and society. The most egregious failure of AI is its inability to admit that it doesn't know what it very clearly doesn't know -- and instead, produces confident-sounding bullshit. The dot-bomb-v2.0 is long overdue.
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@ianiv@mastodon.social 2025-04-26 23:54
@jimbob@aus.social you are going to LOVE my new idea. Why vibe code when you can pay someone else to do it for you? https://yolocode.dev
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@virtualinanity@toot.community 2025-04-27 00:11
@jimbob@aus.social this feels a lot like the 90s when outsourcing to India made computer science the purview of nerds who loved just geeking out on this stuff. There was no promise of huge pay. I feel this is where it’s headed again - the companies that do the best will be the ones that invest in skilled labor versus those who fall for the race to the bottom
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@rskurat@mastodon.social 2025-04-27 00:29
@jimbob@aus.social actual experimental scientists who collect real-world data don't need ai until the write-up stage. Although big pharma has been trying to push through toxicology modeling for literally decades and might win on that point.
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@alanthecampbell@techhub.social 2025-04-27 00:45
@jimbob@aus.social Can't say that I get this vide coding thing [I'm not a programmer, I was only ever good at microcontroller assembler in my tertiary education]. This reminded me though of Jenson Huang's reported position on coding is that no one should bother trying to learn it anymore and just use AI. Again not a coder but to me that seemed to be spectacularly wrong-sighted. Do we not bother to learn how to write too?
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@lykso@tiny.tilde.website 2025-04-27 01:19
@jimbob@aus.social Wendell Berry is turning in his grave.
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@egrinagy@mathstodon.xyz 2025-04-27 01:36
@jimbob@aus.social This seems to be the mechanism of drugs. The more you use them the more you need them.
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@johentsch@hostux.social 2025-04-27 01:37
@jimbob@aus.social "Programmers are also human" latest video is a fantastic satire on the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2C2CNmK7dQ
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@dotsie@mastodon.social 2025-04-27 01:56
@jimbob@aus.social I’ve moved the opposite direction recently and believe that to truly succeed in an advanced field where the technology is leveraged you need to fully understand it. If your field is technology based then that understanding should be nearly to the level of actual from-scratch implementation, not that you’d have the hours or finances to do it but the evaluation skills. I recognize I am a far outlier in this opinion and most people do not want to learn masters degree+ level statistics.
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@beaiouns@is.nota.live 2025-04-27 02:17
@jimbob@aus.social damn, i hadn't even thought of that. gotta add that to the rotation next time the subject comes up
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@viraptor@cyberplace.social 2025-04-27 02:34
@jimbob@aus.social counterpoint: I can write 10+ languages and could learn SwiftUI too. But I wanted a very specific timer app that I got generated while I was doing other programming work. Nobody I actually talk to wants to stop programming. It's either: save time on writing stupid stuff, generate something while programming anyway, or generate something because they can't program in the first place. Who are those people who are ready to deskill?
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@xk3@mastodon.social 2025-04-27 02:53
@jimbob@aus.social plenty of people get by with "renting". It is less honorable in some sense but most people don't care enough to tell the difference. However, I will lament with you for a season. This deskilling will be less like WYSIWYG and more like the transition from platform specific programming to portable compilers. It will be devastating to the abstraction proliferation problem but the world will largely move on fully ignorant of the existential risks
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@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org 2025-04-27 03:33
@jimbob@aus.social Well said
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@rexi@mastodon.social 2025-04-27 04:25
@jimbob@aus.social how about using it where we need it: teaching coding in the absolute most effective manner for an individual's particular needs? who cares if they are forced to ask that embarrassing stupid question after all, if it's just a nice patient AI teacher?
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@momo@social.linux.pizza 2025-04-27 05:48
@jimbob@aus.social And that deskilling will happen. Remember back in die 80s and the early 90s when one wanted to phone someone? You entered the phone number on a landline, digit by digit. For that you had memorized the most important phone numbers. I grew up remembering our homes phone number, the one of my grandma and the one of my best friend in elementary school. Then at the end of the 90s suddenly everyone had mobile phones with all of the numbers in contacts stored on the phone. And I ask you now, how many phone numbers have you memorized today? Yeah, that's how deskilling happens. And you are absolutely right, that vibe coding will deskill people to use program languages. @vaurora@mstdn.social
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@Eco_Stephan@ecoevo.social 2025-04-27 05:50
@jimbob@aus.social I am using R since 2009 and also started to use chatgbt in my coding. It's great. I Iess have to look at old scripts how I did things or my "code collection script". Sure a discussion about stats only succeeded because I know stats. But it still helped. LLMs will be great tools, but not substitute coders. I think it will make coding easier and even people that wouldn't have tried will engage. Doesn't make that the job easier for people that code to be understood?
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@Enea90@mastodon.social 2025-04-27 05:59
@jimbob@aus.social Amen. Same thing about designers.
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@401matthall@mastodon.xyz 2025-04-27 06:07
@jimbob@aus.social It's almost like _skills_ have _value_.
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@illszjan79@mastodon.social 2025-04-27 06:15
@jimbob@aus.social on the science part, considering ai can't adequately solve sophomore year math and physics problems (it does too many mistakes), it can't be relied upon
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@arnan@mas.to 2025-04-27 07:02
@jimbob@aus.social Vibe coders aren’t real coders, and anything they come up with is not worth anyones time.
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@belovedmelody@mastodon.social 2025-04-27 07:07
@jimbob@aus.social this is a really good framing. But what about the not-too-distant future where our personal hardware is powerful enough to run capable models locally?
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@coco_crush@mastodon.social 2025-04-27 07:37
@jimbob@aus.social Hell yes brother! Forcing a single ideology on people and bringing down the overall standard of work and quality of professionals just to provide technological value through AI is such a scam. Typical silicon valley influencer executives: Over-promise and Under-deliver...
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@sunny@boitam.eu 2025-04-27 07:50
@jimbob@aus.social I keep reading deskilling as desk-killing (as in firing) which it ultimately is doing too.
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@ErikJonker@mastodon.social 2025-04-27 08:24
@jimbob@aus.social I am wondering where acceptable tool use while coding stops and unacceptable use of AI for coding begins in your view?
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@beandev@social.tchncs.de 2025-04-27 08:29
@jimbob@aus.social Btw., same discussion with low code development environments. Really expensive SaaS solutions to replace developers. 🤷
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@efi@chitter.xyz 2025-04-27 09:53
@jimbob@aus.social what I don't understand is how people can trust it when asking for a fact you know about will clearly show it confidently making shit up (because it's not a logical output, just statistically likely logical)
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@jannic@hachyderm.io 2025-04-27 09:59
@jimbob@aus.social While this might work out for the corporations right now, I wonder if they have a plan for the longer term. I mean: LLMs might solve some coding problems, and may even replace a lot of junior developers in the short term. (I doubt even that, but let's just assume it for now.) But you will still need experienced people for problems LLMs can't solve. And these people don't grow on trees, they were inexperienced juniors before. If you break that career path, you'll end up with LLMs for the easy problems and no solution at all for more difficult ones.
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@leon@peoplemaking.games 2025-04-27 10:03
@jimbob@aus.social i have yet to see anyone vibe code anything that couldn’t be done in a no-code or lite-code application like excel or Airtable or unreal blueprints or squarespace or the like, except using one of those purpose built tools have better security models, much higher reliability and efficiency, and much better control and domain specificity, and often times with realtime collaboration features The only advantage vibe coding has, in fact is how its ui isn’t as intimidating, it’s not a broad, massive surface, just a friendly little chat box This fact represents a tremendous opportunity for those tool builders. If they’re capable of building a radically simplified user interface and advertising it, they can take over the entire market segment, with none of the overhead, environmental, legal or social stickiness. All of vibe coding is ui arbitrage.
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@rotnroll666@mastodon.social 2025-04-27 10:09
@jimbob@aus.social <3 👏
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@piyuv@techhub.social 2025-04-27 10:54
@jimbob@aus.social how do you define “owning the tools of production”? Doesn’t one technically own the tools when using, for example, python?
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@Taffer@mastodon.gamedev.place 2025-04-27 11:06
@jimbob@aus.social At some point after we’re all fired in favour of cheap vibe coders, we’ll suddenly be in demand to fix all of this mess. Assuming the vibe coder companies survive the wave of security vulnerabilities they’ll be creating. The leadership class is hoping we’ll be desperate enough to do this cheaply. They’ll be lucky if we haven’t all retired or moved on.
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@rogerb@mastodon.scot 2025-04-27 11:09
@jimbob@aus.social Remember that the LLM companies like OpenAI are losing money on every use of their products, and the more users they have the more money they lose. So, they are in a desparate race to find ways to lock in their customers before their investors stop throwing good money after bad. If they succeed then expect their charges to triple (or more). Hence all the pronouncements promoting "fear of missing out" and "you can slash your workforce costs" to commercial businesses.
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@ingonymous@mastodon.social 2025-04-27 11:12
@jimbob@aus.social @Gargron@mastodon.social This is also true for a lot of other topics, somehow. Take for example self-driving cars... They might drive better or worse, whatever... but in the end, they will lead to deskilled people, not able to drive cars anymore.
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@n9g@mathtod.online 2025-04-27 11:14
@jimbob@aus.social 模造知能に頼ることは、大衆のドレイ化を進めることにしかならない(超訳)との主張、お説ごもっとも。
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@grishka@friends.grishka.me 2025-04-27 11:28
I've had so many friends ask me to just please give AI-as-a-tool a try. But, like... I just don't understand what problem that is supposed to solve? I never had this "problem" to begin with. I simply can't bring myself to see LLMs as something beyond a novelty statistical parrot. Yeah ChatGPT and DeepSeek can be fun to play with. But trusting them with something that I'm actually responsible for? Nope, never. I don't need my thinking and expertise outsourced.
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@peteriskrisjanis@toot.lv 2025-04-27 11:45
@jimbob@aus.social it also just basically sets up colossal failure of many project managers realising it doesn't cut costs as they wanted to. Right now big bros made bad calls and they see increasingly that it is not gonna stick. So expect pretty panicky push from them for next year or so. I am not gonna bother. I will use this push as excuse to clear it out and template lot of my current project stuff. But that's about it.
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@bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471@mastodon.social 2025-04-27 11:53
@jimbob@aus.social as far as I'm concerned, if those projects are free software, you might as well own the tools you're using. If CPython doesn't support what you want, and you have the skill, you can make it. You can make a runtime for yourself, from Python, with what you need.
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@art_codesmith@toot.cafe 2025-04-27 11:59
@jimbob@aus.social It's a very interesting point actually. To me, one of the reasons software developers are generally well-compensated, is because the primary "means of production" (so to speak) is a comparatively inexpensive computer. You don't need big and complex machine tools and production lines. There is paid software, but the cost is generally not that big. Now if the AI mongers would be able to sell a $1k/month subscription to developers... That would change the landscape a lot.
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@bexelbie@toot.io 2025-04-27 12:27
@jimbob@aus.social replace “vibe coding” with plumbing and the languages with wrench. This is not a logical argument. People de-skill all the time. Instead they rely on tools, services and others. This isn’t necessarily harmful or helpful.