it’s getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.
And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.
Some have argued it’s just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you’re actively hindering your intelligence somehow.
On the first point:
I’ve tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.
But for the second… isn’t this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren’t experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.
And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn’t you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?
I guess I’m trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be ‘falling behind’ in that affects them more than those who use AI?
I’m in software engineering. AI is pretty far along in my field, and also very suited for it. I’ve spent two decades writing everything from very low-level to high-level code. I enjoy it, but it’s just labor at this point. What LLMs allows me to do is move to the role of systems architect. I have an endless supply of tireless jr engineers to execute my designs.
I get quick results. But I’m not as in touch with the codebase as if I had written it myself. You can do things wrong, and you can do things right. I like to compare it with a chainsaw. You get the job done a lot faster than with a regular saw, but you can fuck up a lot harder, too.
The field is moving fast. In the last two years it’s gone from helpful auto-complete to finishing projects on its own.
I expect to be downvoted.
I’m also in software engineering. I spent some time thinking like you, then some time trying to find a middle ground between using AI like that and doing everything myself.
Now I do it all without AI and am slowly purging all of the rituals around LLM usage from my brain. I’m trying to reclaim that space for useful knowledge in the languages I like to work with.
The reasons are numerous, some ethical, some practical, and some personal.
Ethical:
- There’s no way to use frontier LLMs without contributing to climate change. The products of Anthropic and OpenAI are built on raiding the planet’s resources.
- They’re also built on plagiarism on an unprecedented scale. Their products wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for stealing basically all copyrighted works ever created by people, and would be even less economically viable than they already are if they were forced to pay for the thievery.
- They’re addictive to use. People become dependent on them to the point of losing the ability to make decisions on their own. The non-deterministic nature of their output means people react psychologically to them the way gambling addicts react to roulette wheels, always hoping the next prompt will be the one that hits gold.
- Small, local models help, and the ones that are both open source and open weight are far superior to the rest in terms of ethics, so for anyone addicted to LLMs, I’ll recommend them as a form of methadone. But their psychological impact on their users can be just as damaging.
- The business practices of these companies is driving the largest economic bubble in history. When (not if) the bubble collapses, it will hurt millions of people. They don’t care, because in the short term, number go up.
Practical
- Model-produced code isn’t as good as anyone who’s creating it thinks it is. I’ve lost count of the number of projects I’ve seen from other developers (who think they’ve mastered the art of AI wrangling) that contain rudimentary errors - including gaping security flaws. I found the problems just by being the first person in a while to actually look at the code. No, not diffs, because when you’re churning out five thousand-line PRs, if the PR “looks right,” you’ll usually just sign off on it.
- The Supreme Court has already ruled that the output of LLMs can’t be copyrighted. So from a legal perspective, you’re risking poisoning your own projects with the output of coding agents. If someone steals that output and markets it as their own, what are you going to do? It was already derived from stolen work itself, so it’s not like it’s yours.
- Becoming dependent on businesses that have no path to profitability is a terrible idea. If you have built your workflow around Claude Code and Anthropic folds, what will you do? These companies cannot offer their services in a way that brings them sustainable profit. When the venture capital runs out, the clock starts ticking on their actual viability.
Personal
- Both of my kids are artists. I want to be able to look them in the eye and tell them I’m not using tools that are designed to make creativity obsolete and replace it with statistically generated pixels.
- I’m also a writer. I don’t want to become dependent on tools that deprived my fellow writers of their copyrights so that slop manufacturers can try to replace them with statistically generated words.
- I hate the way I feel when I’m using an LLM. The brief highs of getting the output I wanted (more or less) is offset by the impact on the way my brain works. I find myself thinking less and asking the LLM for its “opinions” more. I stop trusting my own judgment. And I start feeling addicted.
On that last point: I knew I had to stop entirely - not just limit my usage or restrict myself to local models - when I realized part of my brain really didn’t want me to. I had to have an argument with myself in order to do anything by hand, and I like coding by hand. I enjoy the puzzle-solving. AI was replacing my main source of enjoyment in my job.
And it wasn’t even doing that part well, it was just doing it faster. I am a better coder than any LLM, and that’s not a brag, because I know there are tons of developers out there better than me. Faster doesn’t equal better.
So that’s where I’m at today.
Thanks for the great write up. Especially the ethical reasons are so often ignored, overlooked, cast aside with a smirk.
My pleasure. The ethical problems with LLMs are my top concern, and I can only conclude that many people in my industry are too addicted to them now to internalize those problems.
My experience has been that when you educate people on the background and non ethical training on AI, you get a blank stare.
Either the scope is too big or they do not really believe the implications. I don’t know. I wish there was a short layman relatable and believable explanation.
I expect to be downvoted.
I mean, you’re not wrong. You’re only saying facts. I’m a strong AI opponent, but these things you’re saying are simply true. 🤷♂️ That said, I like coding and doing that bit myself, so I’ll keep coding. 😅
Its people falling for propaganda.
The fact of the matter is, AI can be useful for minor coding help. The reality is its stealing advice from one or a few sources and spitting out an answer based on them, but it can be a quick delivery of advice.
The major problem is
- AI (these LLMs) hallucinate ALL THE TIME. Relying on them to code for you is fucking moronic. Every coworker I’ve seen who does vibe coding is constantly getting dunked on, their pull requests are torn to pieces, and its baffling why they still get a paycheck.
- AI can only, in the best circumstances, do exactly what you tell it to do. That is to say, you need to explicitly spell out what you want for it, including explicitly covering edge cases. If you don’t, you end up with situations like Microsoft making Notepad code executable (which actually fucking happened.
Promotion of AI is total horseshit by the fascist tech broligarchs being done so they can replace the worker and, and I’m serious, achieve immortality by transferring their consciousness to machine. That isn’t a fucking joke, that’s an actual belief they hold. The AI and general tech CEOs are all in a massive death cult. This is real.
They think there’s some skill necessary to use LLMs for some reason
I think when people talk about “falling behind” they’re actually talking about missing out on the initial gold rush of novel uses, quick cash grabs, and straight up scams that a lot of people are making short term money on.
There’s a lot clearly unemployed/in industry that doesn’t spin around AI in here.
In dev, AI saves fuck tons of time. But there’s no nuance on the Internet so everyone assumes I’m advocating for vibe coding. I’m not.
What the “fall behind” is referring to is the simplest fact, if you’re in a team and you’re not using AI? You are very likely outputting at a much slower speed.
Now more caveats, you’re not a lead dev or principle architect, your code isn’t second coming of Jesus, you need to get a task done. Like it or not, the pace rest of the team sets? Is the new floor.
I manage a team and while I give them a lot of time to get work done well, the world around us is shrinking in resources. Business cares not that a job takes 4 weeks, they need it done in 2, ideally in 1 week.
Hopefully this sheds some light on this. I’m getting downvoted regardless. I’d probably have more popular opinion praising trump than daring say anything positive about AI here.
I can understand this viewpoint (and it’s similar to the first point), and I do agree that there is a push to defer things to AI. But from my limited experience, it’s like a crutch for other issues that force it to be used by very talented people who otherwise want to get things done properly to save headaches later.
My experience was in the kind of place you would really not want AI to screw you over in, but there was also a very tight timeline to get things done, so I think they ended up just trusting AI to a pretty frightening extent with (iirc) some buildroot stuff that got some people a bit vocal. I think even I used an AI overview once because I just really wanted to be done with a demo.
It was over a year ago though so I don’t really remember what ultimately came of the AI use, but there are 100% situations where this becomes the only option, although I personally will avoid AI unless I’m realistically out of any other option not to. And for that reason I’ve fallen more out of favour with CS since I enjoy the journey and all the little judgements you make more than the outcome.
From what I’ve experienced it’s mostly managers saying this. They’re afraid of competitors taking over the market because they can be more efficient with AI. They say this without any idea of how exactly that would work.
FOMO, and the temptation of being able to get the speed of AI without the drawbacks of “vibe coding”.
Reality is much more nuanced.
You can get a massive boost in your productivity if you use dependencies or just steal code, compared to writing everything from zero. I personally just reuse my own code snippets, and even started to put regularly reused code into their own libraries (next up is to make stuff for parsers).
I also seen cases, when “AI assisted” coding had the same amount of issues as fully vibe coded stuff, as the person really wanting to cram the chatbot into their workflow did that trusted Grok too much with understanding the documentations, so he just ended up trying to implement stuff based on Grok’s summary, which was wrong at places.
If you ask: artists also sometimes fall for this trap, though much less often.
I am reading this book https://thecon.ai/ that, among other things, explains the hype behind the set of tools we call AI. Check it, it might help you answering your question or at least having a different pov compared to the “if you don’t use it you’ll fall behind”.
You can resist as much as you want but technology and big business are going to keep moving whether we like it or not. Unless we all decide to boycott, which we are too comfortable to do, there is no stopping capitalism. So yes, in much of the business world, if you don’t get comfortable with AI, you will fall behind.
That doesn’t mean you have to do anything with AI, tho. If you never learned to use a computer, or Excel, you fell behind in many business settings. Doesn’t mean you have to learn computers.
LLM’s are not the end all be all. There will be another big AI boom at some point in the future and if it’s derivative of LLM’s you may not have the experience to use the new tech as well as others who are well versed with AI. Isn’t good or bad. It’s just how you wanna live your life. Make a living in spaces that don’t require AI.
Try throwing AI at boring repetitive work.
I argued with an LLM for about 15 minutes and got a list of IPs and the name of the systems that used them. I could have done it manually in about an hour.Also I’d argue that it’s the opposite. It’s for people that are experienced. If you can’t check the output for correctness it’s most likely wrong. I’ve never had the right answer the first time I asked.
I think a good alternative explanation is this: AI is here to stay, so knowing how to use it in whatever form it takes in your life as a tool is good knowledge to have.
Typewriters are close to extinction, but most everyone these days uses a computer to write documents. Those that refused to learn how to use a word processing application on a computer were “left behind” because now almost all documentation is written digitally.
AI is here to stay
LLMs are not AI.
I never said they were 🤔
Don’t be daft.
it’s like your face mate, it can’t be helped.
This post explains it better than I could…https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking
This will likely get lost in the sea of comments here… But my opinion to “getting left behind if you don’t know how to use ai” is simply, “no, you’ll be left behind if you don’t know how to engineer ai.” everyone who uses “ai”'s end product will be in the same playing field, if you don’t know how to build and engineer it, then you’re in the same boat as everyone else who knows how to put together a sentence and a question.
If you know how to build a custom ai engine that can do a specific task for a specific field, then you’ll be ahead. If you know how to write out a question to prompt ai, then you can speak a language, congrats, you’re just like everyone else around you. Along with that, if you don’t know anything about the things you’re asking the ai about, then you don’t know how to determine whether it’s giving you accurate information, which makes it useless, maybe not 100% useless, but like 85% useless it something. Can you build a house with a hammer alone? No. You need materials, you need ways to cut wood, you need structural knowledge about building a house before you can build a safe livable house and more than one tool in the tool box.
Idk, it’s one of those things that just kind of feels like something someone would say about something they were told they should say about that thing. This isn’t like the invention of personal computers. I think it’s much more simple then that when it comes to how we interact with it, the impressive knowledge is more about how to engineer it, and how to deploy it for specific use cases. Like the difference between building an efficient refrigerator and using one.
The other problem with not knowing how to build and engineer and deploy your own locally run ai, is that you will become dependant on this 3rd party service and end up paying loads of money for something you wouldn’t have had to if you weren’t “left behind”. That’s what the big corps are hoping happens with all this free access or cheap access, it’s all a scheme to get everyone hooked, so they can pull the rug out from under em and force them to pay astronomical amounts of money to cover the losses they’ve been gambling with this whole time. Also just my opinion but, seems like a pretty decent theory to me lol.
Just speaking into the void here, don’t really expect any replies from me, I don’t have that much more to offer, just figured why not share my thoughts on the subject, it’s one everyone seems to be taking about at the moment. I’ll definitely read anyone’s replies though ❤️
A lot of people think AI makes things exponentially easier, exponentially better, exponentially faster, exponentially more accessible. So, they can do more, faster, with less work. And obviously, if you don’t do that yourself, you’ll be an inefficient, hard working idiot.
There’s also something psychological about peer pressure; if more people do the same thing you do, it’s more acceptable/better/the norm, and the various issues becomes less importants. Kinda like when cryptocurrencies would fix ALL issues everywhere at once forever. Funny enough, we were already taking about how inefficient and costly that was back then.
Of course, people using it without any knowledge of what the output should look like find it magical, but knowledgeable people are more… let’s say, prudent. The faster outcome is debatable; it still requires a fair amount of actual work to be put in unless you just do the same thing that’s been done millions of time before. And worst of all, some people seems to “forget” how to do things without an LLM very quickly, to the point that they’ll tell you that some things are actually impossible to do without them.
Seems like some people are looking at the AI chatbot and thinking “this thing is smarter than me.”
AI’s extremely flawed still, but it’s improving. There might actually be a day when it can do many of the things they promise. Supposedly it’s helping disease research. That seems undeniably good. Right now it’s useful in a few ways, in the future it will be helpful in more ways.
My biggest concern is that AI chatbots will soon start giving alternate versions of history. Becoming a huge propaganda tool. Even more than currently. I am afraid for the day when 99% trust it blindly. And that day is already almost here.
