Joe

That this is and will be abused is not in question. :-P

You are making a leap though.

While this is a popular sentiment, it is not true, nor will it ever be true.

AI (LLMs & agents in the coding context, in this case) can serve as both a tool and a crutch. Those who learn to master the tools will gain benefit from them, without detracting from their own skill. Those who use them as a crutch will lose (or never gain) their own skills.

Some skills will in turn become irrelevent in day-to-day life (as is always the case with new tech), and we will adapt in turn.

Indeed… Throw-away code is currently where AI coding excels. And that is cool and useful - creating one off scripts, self-contained modules automating boilerplate, etc.

You can’t quite use it the same way for complex existing code bases though… Not yet, at least…

I’m sure gulags / laogai / reeducation / forced labor camps are much more ethical… /s

I couldn’t agree more. Although I’ll add that education and basic health/social support is also needed for long term stability, or large swathes of the population will be manipulated by fear and dis/misinformation, and will likely end up voting against their own interests. Social cohesion is important, which is why it is used as a weapon by nation states and other political actors.

The USSR is dead and cold, replaced by an authoritarian warmongering machine. It had its moment in the spotlight, but it failed, and it failed its russian and former citizens.

China promotes many good principles (in many ways so did the USA, cough cough), but it is heading in the wrong direction under Xi. It’s Communism with a human exploitative flavour, with the occasional public fig leaf of justice. That said, it could offer an umbrella of security for some more interesting experiments in the years to come. Watch this space, I guess.

Circling back to my original point, I maintain that communism isn’t going to gain popular support so long as the only viable way to achieve it is through violence and oppression, and so long as it buckles so easily under the pressure of outside forces.

I will continue voting and protesting for sensible left-leaning policies that promote fairness and well being for all, while steering clear of the extremists and simpletons who promote hate or explicitly or tacitly support genocides, wars of aggression, etc. The scales may tip enough one day to justify radical action, but not today - the risks of it going terribly wrong are too high.

I’d love to see a utopia, but I don’t see communism making any sustainable inroads anywhere in the world… that is, unless things get much much worse, to the point that your average man is willing to pick up a pitchfork (or other weapon of choice) and participate in overthrowing ruling class by force… but nowadays the masses are so divided and confused that they’ll probably start killing each other for scraps of food rather than the billionaires for a life of dignity. Even then, it’s just temporary until capitalism and/or authoritarianism takes hold again.

I may have got carried away in my response to a one line quip. 🤣

Are you trying to say that communism leads to a failed authoritarian state resembling the US in terms of income inequality? Do you have the same stats for wealth inequality too?

In a naive attempt to “meet everyone’s basic needs” sure, but in practice it would almost certainly end up enriching and entrenching a new ruling class, or collapsing under external pressure even if there are some early wins.

Many things sound simple from the outset. But tearing down and rebuilding an entire society isn’t something you do without significant (and often lethal) force and with plenty of intended and unintended casualties along the way (and there’s still a very good chance we’d screw it up).

If it’s not “the good guys” wielding overwhelming force, it’ll be “the bad guys” stepping in. Every political system ultimately rests on the realistic threat/application of force; the only question is who controls it and how accountable they are.

I’m not inclined to trust anyone waving guns in my face, nor encourage situations that make that more likely. So, things would have to get a lot worse for me (and I’d venture most people) to want violent overthrow of my current (far from perfect) political and social system. That said … at some point, for many people in many countries, it may be too late. Apathy isn’t appropriate either.

Interesting fact: You can use an elephant’s trunk as a low-resolution 3D printing nozzle

Hah, yeah. Vibe coding and prompt engineering seem like a huge fad right now, although I don’t think it’s going to die out, just the hype.

The most successful vibe projects in the next few years are likely to be the least innovative technically, following well trodden paths (and generating lots of throwaway code).

I suppose we’ll see more and more curated collections of AI-friendly design documents and best-practice code samples to enable vibe coding for varied use-cases, and this will be the perceived value add for various tools in the short term. The spec driven development trend seems to have value, adding semantic layers for humans and AI alike.

Yeah - there’s definitely a GIGO factor. Throwing it at a undocumented codebase with poor and inconsistent function & variable names isn’t likely to yield great revelations. But it can probably still tell you why changing input X didn’t result in a change to output Y (with 50k lines of code in-between), saving you a bunch of debugging time.

Most code on the planet is boring legacy code, though. Novel and interesting is typically a small fraction of a codebase, and it will often be more in the design than the code itself. Anything that can help us make boring code more digestible is welcome. Plenty of other pitfalls along the way though.

I have a suspicion that the guy took issue with my use of “one” instead of “you”, more-so than the content. Maybe it came across as uppity.

It’s a changing world, and there is going to be an ever increasing amount of AI slop out there, and even more potential programmers who won’t make the leap due to the crutch.

At the same time, there are always people who want to and will learn in spite of the available crutches the latest tech revolution brings.

There will also be many good engineers who will exploit the tech for all its worth while applying appropriate rigour, increasing their real productivity and value manyfold.

And there will be many non-programmers who can achieve much more in their respective fields, because AI tools can bridge gaps for them.

Hopefully we won’t irreversibly destroy ourselves and our planet while we’re at it. 🙈

Hm? Oh, I obviously misread the room. It seems I interrupted a circle jerk? My apologies.

No, but it can help a capable developer to have more of those moments, as one can use LLMs and coding agents to (a) help explain the relationships in a complicated codebase succinctly and (b) help to quickly figure out why one’s code doesn’t work as expected (from simple bugs to calling out one’s own fundamental misunderstandings), giving one more time to focus on what matters to oneself.

Big Beautiful Bill, obviously AI

That all goes well until someone uses your platform for scams or CSAM… or when (as the other guy said), infra costs go up. Throw in various privacy regulations, and it can be a frustrating and costly endeavour.

There’s a sweet spot, but I fear it’s quite a small one.