I don't agree. I'm recently a huge believer in Programming as Theory Building. The software creation itself is the part that makes you understand what you are building. It's impossible to understand things before you start building them, initial prompt can help you explore, but the idea that after that you can lean back is ridiculous. Most or maybe even all successful software projects are still heavily relying on the best software engineers. That's why anthropic and others are still hiring SDEs.

That temptation is akin to giving in to maladaptive (day)dreaming. The problem is the dreaming, the noticing, the getting annoyed, and the feeling drained - all of these are happening at one place - being done by one entity - your brain. So how to train it to not to do that? Well, again, that same brain has to do it. What I am saying here is - our brains are extremely good at getting "used to". Because it "feels good" to the brain - at least in that instant. So any work that's happening on its own, feels good for most people. More the time passed in that "got/getting used to" state unchecked, more difficult it is to try and bring it back to not getting used to. Or control it, in an attempt to strike a fine balance.

They're getting mad because they want you to build your replacement

Suppose I do something myself. I reap all the benefits, but it takes a lot of time, I may not have the expertise to do a good job, and I get all the blame if something goes wrong. Suppose I go to the park and find one of several guys who would do it for free. I get all the of benefits, he might do an excellent job, but, because there's no contract, I still take all the blame.

Suppose I actually hire a professional to do it. I receive fewer of the benefits. However, he's much more likely to do a good job, and the legal system provides a variety of ways to hold him accountable for the work.

Suppose I hire a professional, but then insist that he use legions of guys from the park to do the actual work, since that's going to be some much faster and cheaper per quantum of work. I also tell him that if he's unwilling to do that, I'll find someone who will. I also tell him that, since he has so much more unoccupied time now that the original work is in the hands of all those other dudes, he gets to supervise still more work done by other swarms of guys from the park.

At this point it should be clear that I'm not interested in quality work, but in having someone poised to absorb blame. I want a patsy.

Now replace "guys at the park" with LLMs, and replace "free" with "nearly free, but with no warranty."

My company is doing this, too. It’s the reason I’m submitting my resignation notice next week.

Yup. This is coming from the top, and it's very much because the AI sales pitch that executives bought into is, "Automation can help you reduce head count."

That means that they really don't care if, right there in the moment, just doing the job is faster and better. What they care about is that the actual work is being done by humans, and that's out of line with their grand vision of getting rid of humans.

> Even if I agree that you have to use your brain, when my boss is literally telling me to stop questioning whether AI automation is the right answer in team meetings/chats I'm just going to shut up and give them what they want.

Some would tell you that you need to find a different job with a better boss, but I'd say that this is quickly becoming something very hard to escape from. Investors want line to go up, and they all talk to each other about this "AI" thing that lets them cut staff and keep productivity, so naturally we're all getting it crammed down our throats.

Same. My team lead sits near me. He keeps checking if I'm using claude, or when we talk he pushes me to use claude.

It's have gotten to the point that I wanted to work on something manually, so I booked a room in the office. Just to not be at my desk, because I'm afraid my claude usage will be reflected in my performance review.

Or not trying to actually finding a root cause. Look i increased the storage for customer, problem solved.

No? You solved the symptom not the issue?

Combining your thoughts, one could almost think that being a meat proxy works for quite a long time, before institutional inertia catches up.

Sounds like a quiet few years and then effort once demanded. So I guess... being a meat proxy does work, after all?

I don't doubt using an LLM is deskilling. The question is whether it's the kind of deskilling where you can't farm if you don't know how crops work or the kind of deskilling where you can drive without knowing how to maintain your own internal combustion engine.

(In my lifetime, I've even watched mass cellular communication move "replacing your own tire" from skilled to deskilled, since AAA is always one phone call away for most drivers).

I'm starting to thing AI is the baseline of cognition and it matches the worst parts of humanity. Its just, we trained on the better parts so it's not so obvious.

I think you missed the point entierly. The problem is not people turning their brains off, the problem is brains wony be needed anymore in the near future, not even meat proxy brains

I don't buy this analogy and I think it takes a depressingly reductive view of creativity. In both cases, the photographers had to take the time to go to a place, see a view they thought was worth capturing, operated their equipment to get a shot, and then had enough discernment to recognize which of their final products were worth something. Both the traditional photographer and the modern photographer can create images of value in different ways.

If you want to shoehorn AI into this analogy at all then no one is even bothering going hiking at this point, let alone seeing anything worth capturing. It would just vomit up endless permutations of statistically average images that look like the kind of pictures people take of landscapes.

The tourist has another advantage over your photographer: experience. They have thousands of photographs to look at and thus get a better scene of what makes things good. That is if you took both to the same spot and gave them one photograph (the phone's memory is almost full) the tourist is likely to get the better shot because they have a better idea of when to pull the trigger having seen all the possibilities.

This analogy seems strained to me.

The credulous LLM users Dan Luu is complaining about don't take the equivalent of thousands of photos of the same sunset. They take a couple photos at most, say "LGTM", and move on to taking a photo of something else, even if their couple of photos of the sunset aren't great.

As someone who will often compare different things, I think doing that usually takes time. I think LLMs can help reduce the time (especially if it's programming, not necessarily so much in other areas), but I'm not seeing many people use LLMs to try a large number of independent approaches and compare them.

> The thinking guy with the one approach will likely lose a photo competition to one of the accidentally better shots of the person who tried a lot more.

If that were the case then photo competitions would have been upended by now by tourists who accidentally took masterpieces with their phones.

I can take as many thousands of pictures as I want but, without taking the time to critically review them to see what works and what doesn't, I will rarely produce a prize-worthy picture. And then there's the risk that I'll discard it anyway because I don't have the eye to separate the prize-winning picture from the Instagram shot all my contacts are publishing.

I think this analogy works with respect to stuff like coding, engineering, etc, where the AI is capable of validating the success of its own efforts and where the result just has to "work", regardless of its elegance or aesthetic quality.

I also think the analogy works if we're talking about average photographs, or even very good photographs, that are conventionally well-composed, balanced, etc, but lack the special spark that we associate with true art.

But if the photographer on the hill is a real artist, it's hard for me to imagine a current frontier LLM winning the contest. I suppose it may stumble upon a winning photo sooner than a roomful of monkeys would, but I believe the number of attempts would still be so vast that it would be more efficient for the human to make one single attempt at taking a photo, rather than dealing with prompts and sorting through the millions of AI-generated options.

EDIT: I also think it's very easy to underestimate the size of the nearly limitless set of possible "solutions" to the photograph, and also easy to overlook the constant feedback loop in the artist's mind as he considers each option and looks through the viewfinder, while the LLM is shooting blind the entire time.

Even in the late 19th century "bracketing" was already a photographic technique where a photographer would take several shots of the same subject from various angles and with various settings. Digital cameras may make this faster and cheaper, but the one who employs thoughtful practices in their photography is far more likely to win that competition than the one who just (to paraphrase your example) spins to win.

Maybe so, but for the good shots by the thinking guy, I suspect he would derive longer term emotional gratification from how well they came out. Effort and investment adds to the experience.

Making things easy is good as long as it is not too easy, then it's Spotify muzak.

>That’s what AI does.

Except it sometimes shows you a photo of something completely different than what you're looking at for or alters the landscape to "improve" it. Maybe that's not a good analogy.

You are a god. You step on the puny human and create a thousand sunsets. Maybe the photographer wasn't needed in the first place.

This ignores the reality that many people are, unfortunately, taking that one iPhone picture, sending it to everyone in their contacts list as if it’s art, and then moving on to the next slop shoot.

Once upon a time, in Switzerland, there was a "chronometry contest" putting the best watchmakers of Switzerland against each other to make the most accurate mechanical watch and have it certified by the observatory of Neuchâtel (observatories were at the time the entities in charge of giving the most accurate time, based on reference star observations).

It worked for a time, and manufactures employed experienced, legendary even, watchmakers and specialized "watch setters" to create and tune to the best possible extent a few experimental watch movements. They would be sold as collection pieces, the firm would gain boasting rights in its advertising, and the experience informed the design and tuning of more mainline movements.

By the end of the history of (the revival* of) this concours, the winner was always Tissot, a second-rate company. What hides behind Tissot is ETA, a huge watch movement manufacturer for all of the Swatch group (dozens of brands, from Omega to the worst no-name stuff you can find).

What they were doing to win was just to pick the best watch movements out of the millions of basic, bland, uninteresting "workhorse" ones they were producing each year. Just by chance, there was always one combination of the hundreds of components, each with their manufacturing tolerances and variations, that would fit all together to make an exceptionally accurate movement.

In the end, yes, Tissot won repeatedly. But the concours is dead. And Tissot is still a second-rate brand making second rate watches. Nobody is interested by their watch movements, no collector, no historian, no customer.

And how do you get a person able to nail "that one shot" when the moment is fleeting? Your "tourist" is unable to do it, because he never put any deliberate practice in photography.

Incidentally, analog film photography is having a huge revival, and Instax is still Fujifilm's best seller. Maybe there is something missing from "I did an award-winning photo but I have have no clue how, lol".

Is there anybody here who wants to have their portrait taken by the "tourist"? Is there anyone here who would prompt an AI to generate their portrait, apart from Ghibli-style remixes (which are funny five minutes, and stale a month later)?

That's an interesting analogy, because there's still a spectrum. Photography's big advancement was the move to digital. Prior to that, you had to know what an F stop is, different developer chemicals, manual focus. These days, yes, an iPhone is actually quite good at taking pictures. Apple invested billions for that to happen, it wasn't an accident. SLR cameras are still there though, you still have wedding photographers. You don't have the mall photographer for once a year photoshoots so much anymore, however. Everyone just takes pictures everywhere as they need. Software is the same now. I need a program to do a thing, I'll just have AI whip one up instead of looking for software that does something that but has 100 more features I don't need. Gone are the days where customers would come to the mall to get photos done and buy software. (Though that world's been gone for a while.) Software is now only a means to an end, so better find the customers that have needs and embed with them instead of having them look for Photoshop.

I'm interpreting this as justification for sysadmins making a comeback, which I would absolutely love. We lost so much as a society when they were taken behind the shed.

Train conductors should be automated, we have better things to spend government money on than make work jobs. LIRR pays conductors 200k. It’s theft at that point

I think you may need to update your priors a bit. AI is already replacing professionals. Developers are already losing jobs. LLMs and agents are already running in the hot loops of our technological civilization, unsupervised, with root. Institutional knowledge and skills are already being lost.

Moral Crumple Zones https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-moral-crumple-zones.html

Interesting thought. In a way this is already the case, to some extent.

But wouldn’t it be way more economical to have some sort of AI-insurance service? i.e. protection against AI fucking things up?

Yeah this is the closest I've found to explaining my own discomfort. Why I've been almost entirely an individual contributor my whole career and why I may opt-out and retire.

I have limited tolerance to take demeaning workload that I know "the boss" could do himself. I think my pride and satisfaction is in my intellectual contribution, not my ability to relay messages nor do repetitive slop work.

But the real revulsion is being a scapegoat. I will not rubber stamp and take responsibility for things not under my control. I have limited capacity to review and sign off work I've delegated to someone else. It is usually easier for me to do it myself and know it inside-out than to delegate and then review enough to have the requisite confidence in the result.

When the new plan is to increase throughput via delegation to these generators, I can't possibly review to my standards. So, I refuse to accept any of it as my work.

It also freaks me out a bit to think of the collective mess that is developing across society, with so many people apparently ready and willing to shovel and rubber-stamp. I think the "move fast and break everything" cult is going too far.

But, primarily, I just need to protect my own sanity and live to my own standards. And hope that I can back away far enough to avoid some of the splash damage when entropy catches up...

More commonly known as an "accountability sink". These existed before but it is so much worse with AI.

It pays 16 craploads of money per year.

Like so: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/blame

Is being compliance ablative armor uplifting, fulfilling work? Is there any way in which your personal competence and effort impacts whether the AI screws up or not? Do you have any way to build job security as ablative armor?

That sounds miserable.

I don't think that's quite the problem the OP is pointing out. A corollary of "meat proxy" is "cognitive surrender." [1] In both cases, blindly pasting AI output and being an "Enter key presser", you have surrendered your cognition. In the latter case, you're in the loop but there's not a lot of reason for you to be.

Your underlying supposition is right, though. If you are truly thinking and in the loop, you are by definition not a meat proxy. I think those are the people who are successful with AI coding tools, but it takes discipline and it's still hard to find the joy and reward when you're not the one solving the problems.

[1] https://swiftrocks.com/using-ai-without-losing-critical-thin...

I think it might be appropriate if what we're talking about is a human connecting an LLM to something it can't natively access. Like something in the physical world - a piece of hardware, a different human, software the LLM can't access. As the human in the loop your role might be to mostly just shuffle information back and forth from this external resource. But depending on the situation there could still be quite a lot of interpretation and analysis performed by the human in the loop.

No, it's usually an instinctive power-saving mechanism, and it happens incredibly frequently.

For example, the average driving commuter is not "zoning out" because of some bad experience with roads or cars, but because the route is extremely familiar.

Heh, do you see how mad some people here on HN get when Claude tells them no. They must all be in management. It's a very delicate dance.

I’m not allowed to enter legit chess tournaments where if I’m going be using my phone’s chess engine app to tell me the best move in every single position. Because that’s considered cheating by the chess players and tournament organizers and rightly so. But, there doesn’t seem to be an incentive to not do something similar in the world of work unless your LLM output is so bad or obviously inaccurate.

And if it's that's true... What reason is there for the company's clients to keep sending money?

Clients will cut the middle man and run the LLM themselves.

Why do you assume that the fully engaged employee would be laid off at all?

I think there's just too many confounding variables to say. ZIRP policy ended in 2022, with interest rates going up 5% between 2022 and mid-2023[1]. This both means that money was historically cheap when these early-career developers were being hired in the peak, and it was relatively (in terms of the past couple of decades; eg, the modern tech industry) expensive after.

We've seen layoffs as a result of this, and nobody's hiring a cohort of juniors when they're trying to afford the employees they already have.

On top of that, companies are firing the money cannon at AI initiatives and experiments (some of which will be successful and others which won't), leaving less money for humans.

Anyway, it's just a single occurrence of a hiring drop in a single economic cycle. Unfortunately, it just happens to perfectly line up with the rise of GenAI. We may never be able to tease apart cause and effect in this period, and we certainly won't be able to do so until we have at least a handful more years of data to see how junior hiring does or does not rebound.

[1]https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/zirp