anyone else feel that AI has sucked all joy out of the open source world?
i used to scroll fdroid when I’m bored and it was so exciting sometimes
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I just hate the feeling of chatting with something that is designed to sound human when I got into software devrlopment because I got tired of dealing with people in the first place.
From my perspective natural language isn’t expressive enough to describe a computer program and that’s why programming languages were created. That’s one of the reasons you gotta keep prompting over and over again.
Couple that with the gambling type feeling I get when I use them (keep rolling the dice until something is spit out that “works”), just feels gross to me.
It’s really depressing to me because I really enjoy programming and I know there are tons out there like me who have had the same passion with it.
I learned how to sweat copper so I could replace some shoddy plumbing in my house done by a previous owner, and that brought me more pride and joy than anything I’ve done in my 10-year career as a developer. I’d but a copy of this in a heartbeat.
- You learned something practical
- You did work and can observe the result of your work
- Your work is beneficial
Professional software development is now so abstracted from the real world (and other software development areas), those three are barely applicable.
good on you mate!
Not me. I don’t use it because it’s (mostly) immoral. Sure, it feels like a thorn in the side, a parasite oozing through the walls, but I still enjoy coding.
I also have good reason to believe that nothing resembling modern technology will understand what it’s doing, so we always have that most important edge.
Oh, please, not a plumber. I’m traumatized by broken pipes!
It’s sucked the joy out of the whole field for me, yeah. I really enjoy programming and have since I was barely a teenager. Throughout my career I’ve even enjoyed doing code reviews because it brought me joy to see clever solutions to problems and to be able to discuss them with their authors, but with AI I just can’t anymore. Most of the time the code is just generated with no actual human thinking involved
I also have coworkers who aren’t even programming at all anymore. They tell me about how they just set up agents to work on features and review the output every half an hour and I don’t understand at all because that sounds awful to me even if the code is perfect.
I expect it all to come crashing down soon but its not soon enough because it’s all been rather soul crushing
Likewise, but the code is pretty far from perfect. “Future maintenance hazard”, but half my colleagues can’t even see what’s wrong with it, and the bot tells them it’s all fine so they don’t think about it any further.
Can’t wait for that bubble to burst. Burn the whole lot down.
I’m still practicing my human art skills, my 3d modeling, sculpting, painting, my fundamentals.
I’m still struggling to learn programming the hard way, only using a bot on my own GPU as a last resort to rubber-duck or explain higher-level concepts to my thick skull.
Screw this hardware inflation, I’m holding out and keeping old machines around and I’ll drop back several tech-generations if I have to.
I’m hoping if anything , my perseverance will be rewarded in a post-Ai-bubble world where I’m considered good at what I do, especially after the majority had simply thrown up their hands, given up, and brain-atrophied after they saw a generated Will Smith believably slurping 65 lbs of spaghetti and everything under the sun “But as a Miyazaki film.”
It’s a monster that feeds on our fears to drive us into despair. We should refuse to let it see us flinch.
Oh, yeah what I wrote came out far differently than I intended it to. I meant more like even in the unlikely scenario where it WAS perfect, I’d still hate it.
Idk I haven’t seen an AI that writes acceptable C/C++ yet (to be honest I haven’t looked that hard)… So as long as my projects focus is low level, thin, maintainable code, I can still do things AI won’t be able to for a long time.
I recognize that being free to write code however I want makes me privileged, and others don’t have that freedom.
Despite that, I am afraid of what will happen to the open source tools I depend on. None of us write our code alone.
Personally, yes but also im seen this stuff not work at all. I help people alot on a large programming discord and ive seen schizophrenic coding and its always AI. I usually tell them I can’t help you because its almost all wrong. They are usually upset but the code makes up non existent calls and what not. I’m thinking when they took all the content from GIT it did much more damage to the AI than they realize yet. Then people post about the code and they replug the code into AI, making a shit eater, eat its own shit.
edit: Why am I flagged dupe? My grammar is way to shit for me to be a bot?
Talk to any master plumber. You will wreck your body. It’s not a forgiving career.
Electrician people.
I’m not so sure electrician is any easier on the body. Both require lots of sustained effort at odd and awkward positions.
Not arguing one is better or worse, just that both are physically demanding jobs that are quite different than riding a desk all day.
I’ve never met an electrician with a destroyed body but I’ve met many master plumbers with it.
The big difference is electrical rarely involves laying on the floor in tight spaces navigating existing furniture.
Electricians usually just die instantly, instead of destroying their body over time.
Feature, not a bug
One of those trades don’t come with PCB.
Career-wise, even the usual insider mouthpieces are starting to agree that AI won’t kill CS:
But yeah, AI has definitely scorched the FOSS landscape. We will somehow figure out a way though.
I was recently listening to a Cory Doctorow interview where he was discussing the concept of “reverse centaurs”. Essentially, if a centaur is a human who uses technology to perform a task they cannot alone, a reverse centaur is the opposite. Think amazon warehouse workers. An algorithm tells the worker where to pick up the box, and where to put it down. It does all the thinking, and the human is just a pair of hands.
One path you can take is that you have skilled professionals who have a depth of knowledge in their field, and can skillfully use an AI to enhance their work. The AI can for example, proof-read human made code and look for typos, bugs, or other possible mistakes that we all as humans occasionally make. This is a centaur situation, where the human is in the driver’s seat.
The other path is that corporations can have fewer skilled professionals in fields that were previously difficult to automate. AI allows you to fire 90% of those professionals and the ones that remain are essentially glorified amazon warehouse workers who do the bidding of the AI. They hit enter on the keyboard, they sign off on the code, and they most importantly fall on the sword when the AI fails. This is the reverse centaur situation
So while these jobs may be “safe” from AI, it’s important that we avoid the reverse-centaur path. Though with corpos’ tendency to chase profit over all else, this might be a big ask.
Until AI boosters are mercilessly persecuted like script kiddies of yore open source won’t get better. Codeberg has the right idea.
it kills the joy in CS
I heard people being concerned that a job in CS would change from writing code to fixing bugs in AI code, and that sounds dreadful
No longer will need a software engineer but a software technician. Lol
A company i applied for and had 2 interviews at, is planing to do that…idk if i rather want to be homeless or do that and get lots money
“lots”
For me getting 3k net is lots. Even more than i could spend
Someone close to me is an accountant, and is facing layoffs, downsizing, and much-longer working hours, as management pushes remaining staff to use more and more AI in accounting analysis and reporting. Trying to get one accountant to accomplish what used to take several.
I’m surprised at the inclusion of “accounting” on this list.
Yeah, but the actual gain these companies are having is that AI is giving them the perfect excuse to increase labor exploitation. They aren’t producing more with AI, but they are actually getting less people to do more work by simply increasing their workload and working hours, with the excuse that somehow AI will make the work easier.
Pretty crazy since I keep hearing from engineer graduates that they can’t find jobs anywhere.
Safe from AI replacement doesn’t mean safe from a recession that’s being covered up by AI circular financing and a convenient spin story for the resulting mass layoffs.
I have two of the degrees in that list, and yet I still don’t feel safe from AI.
There are generally only so many jobs that really need a CS degree, more people hold the degree than are needed and the usual catchment path of ‘IT Janitorial’ is being eaten by AI.
CS & IT is like building a car and servicing it, IMO.
Both are obviously needed but why on earth conflate the two so often?
Hopefully it will widen the gap between those who can and those who cannot (at least yet), even if there will be loads of more of the latter.
The greed of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
“The Earth”.
we’re not hiring either! lol
That hog lying down conjures up to me the image of a dying forest god from Princess Mononoke.
