Mastodawn

"Learning to work effectively with AI is quickly becoming a core professional skill. Ignoring AI today would be like refusing to adopt source control twenty years ago."

Oh golly, I almost forgot SVN stole hundreds of thousands of peoples' (and particularly artists) livelihoods, set us back decades in climate change emissions reduction and increasingly hurling towards global catastrophe while _also_ upending global economy in hogging the combined human output of equipment production to manifest _even more_ data centers that will propel us even further towards a hypercapitalist dystopian hellscape. Good to be reminded.

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Andrew Dalke Feb 20

@flaki If that argument is taken seriously, professionals can ignore AI for 10-25+ years.

20 years ago is 2006. SCCS started in late 1972. From "The Source Code Control System" (1975): "The Programmer's Workbench has proven to be very popular with both management and programmers, and is now used by almost all software projects at the author's installation." "The Evolution of a Source Code Control System" (1978) says there were 3 million LOC under SCCS.

Where I worked in 1993-1998, we used CVS.

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Jeff Grigg Feb 20

@dalke @flaki

Yea; I learned RCS (Unix Revision Control System) in the 1970s.

And some people are going without source control even now.

But source control has obvious benefits, in terms of tracking changes, recovering old versions, collaboration between team members, auditing, etc.

…

The best measures of LLM usage show slightly negative value. And they'd have to multiply productivity by at least an order of magnitude to actually be worthwhile.

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Andrew Dalke

@JeffGrigg @flaki My comment was directed more to the presented thesis.

1) if it has meaning we can look at the history of source control to see the decades of development, cost/benefit studies, and diffusion, including grass-roots uptake, before it became an expected skill for professional developers ca. 20 years ago;

2) otherwise, it demonstrates that the person making the argument (and most of the audience, alas) is ignorant of the history.

The word "truthiness" is also ca. 20 years old.

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Jeff Grigg Feb 20

@dalke @flaki

I think we are, mostly, vigorously agreeing with each other.

Yes, some employers "forced" source control onto coders who did not want it.

But it's a cheap technology with lots of obvious and easily measurable benefits for the users and many others.

LLMs are costly, even "after" externalizing many of their costs. And their measured benefits are somewhere between "meh" and "you're better off without it."

And we're facing massive forced adoption.

Those are big differences.

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Andrew Dalke Feb 20

@JeffGrigg @flaki I think we are having adjacent conversations.

You are comparing the pros and cons of using that technology. I agree with your assessment.

But I am criticizing the logic of a specific argument which, in its attempt to draw a parallel between the use of version control and use of AI to advocate for wider AI use, actually ends up being an argument *against* wider AI use.

I further conjecture that argument is made not from knowledge of history, but from truthiness vibes.