Item — HN Reader

I tend to agree. I believe most of these arguments, whether consciously or not, are rooted in sour grapes.

If AI were already the norm, and someone came along and said, "hey! I've got a great idea! Instead of AI building all this stuff, what if we did it by hand?" and talk about all these amazing benefits to hand crafting code, people would largely say no thanks.

As far as the abstraction argument goes, well, we've been creating higher order abstractions for a long time and called it good. I don't see why we should suddenly be against abstraction.

1 comments

That's an argument from assumption. The issue isn't whether AI is "building all this stuff" but how well it's doing it, how well the people using it are doing it, how expensive it really is, and whether there are observable objective benefits at the end - not just a subjective sense that some work is taking less time.

The reality is probably bimodal. The people who are benefiting are benefiting a lot, but they're likely in a minority. The majority will be tokenmaxxing at great expense and spinning their wheels in real terms.

But there's no hard research to prove that.

Considering the huge sums involved, the absence is interesting.

Calling that an argument from assumption is fair. I am basing this on where I think the puck is going, but I don't think I'm wrong. The issues you mention are not unsolvable problems, and AI is very good at independently iterating and improving on an observable objective metric.

Reality is certainly bimodal today, but that's because as an industry we're lagging behind capability. We're in the early days of the innovator's dilemma S-curve.