arclight5d ago

I feel we've reached a point where many if not most of the organizations we rely on are being overrun by toddlers.

We're constantly bring sold the belief that a chatbot is a viable substitute for thinking, skill, and hard work, of expertise and competence.

I've had conversations with people about AI agents and coding, how people want to have made something they've imagined without having to do the work of actually learning, designing and building. It's like a toddler demanding to be allowed to drive the fire truck without knowing how to drive, not being able to reach the pedals, and not knowing anything about fighting fires.

The want to be what they imagine a firefighter is from the perspective of a toddler. They don't know, they don't care, they just want to be in that truck and make the lights and sirens go.

That outlook is fine for a toddler, it's not acceptable for a grown adult drawing a paycheck.

Show threadtrademark
@arclight Counterpoint, I am seeing a steady stream of useful code being made by people who are not programmers. Most of these are for purely personal use, like an app for a family to coordinate activities. Or the defense editor at the Economist has made a web-page for tracking airplane movements in the middle east. A travel blogger I'm following made this: https://randomwire.com/mapthread/ which I found made the posts much more engaging.
Mapthread: Tell a Story with a Map

In 2016, Craig Mod and Dan Rubin published Koya Bound, a beautiful photo book covering an eight day hike on the Kumano Kodō pilgrimage trail in Japan. Alongside this they made a companion website w…

Randomwire
Mar 19 at 12:08pmWeb
Show threadarclight5d ago

@trademark Which is fine for personal use, putting aside all the other unresolved problems with commercial chatbots.

There are problems when you share code you don't understand built with other people's unatttibuted work. You have no idea where that code gets used later and laundering attribution is wrong. It's even worse when you take money for it and call yourself a programmer. That's fraud.

Show threadtrademark4d ago
@arclight There's certainly a lot of fraud going on, like what happens in every bubble. However whenever there's a bubble, it is important to determine if anything intrinsically valuable is being created. In this case I'm convinced it is, like it was in the dot-com bubble, but unlike crypto-currencies which are useless for anything other than criminial behaviour.