Arne Brasseur8h ago

It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.

How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.

But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.

Show threadHans Hübner8h ago

@plexus In the end, software engineering is about creating solutions to problems other people have. The solutions are not a byproduct, but the primary purpose. To the majority of users, the inner workings and the creation process of software is opaque. The qualities that software exposes on the outside are largely independent of its inner workings.

This means that for most people in the software industry, adapting to the new tooling that makes the creation process more efficient is 1/

Show threadHans Hübner8h ago

@plexus not a matter of choice, or resent. The market for "human crafted" software will be small, much smaller than the market for software that is cheap and does what users "want".

It is clear that the hidden costs of LLM generated software are huge, but these costs are not going to be realised at the point of creation.

This mechanism is the same for many aspects of capitalism. Opting out of one thing won't fix the system, but is a gesture. Just. 2/2

Show threadcan7h ago
@hanshuebner @plexus yes and no. It‘s a systemic problem that needs a fix on a regulatory scale. But enough single devs opting out can also make a difference. Furthermore, regulation is done by politics, which in the end is the sum of the votes and voices of the people.
Show threadHans Hübner7h ago

@can @plexus It is a personal choice to frame it that way, if you can afford it. For the majority of developers, it is a question of adapting or dropping out of the industry.

Humanity went through this process a couple of times now, and every industrial cycle left those who were made redundant by new technologies with the same choice.

Social change is possible, but our class - workers of the software industry - is not going to spark the next revolution, I fear.

Show threadArne Brasseur7h ago
@hanshuebner @can seriously Hans, I am in no mood for this. Yes, the force of capital is overwhelming, and there's little that a bubble of old timers on the fediverse is going to do about it. We're all going to have to reckon with that and figure out what choices we have left. That's life under capitalism. The least we can do is speak our truth, and call things out for what they really are. At least we won't feel like we're the only ones who think this shit sucks, or who see it for what it really is. There's a reason I talk about hegemony. The defeatism only hastens the process.
Show threadHans Hübner7h ago

@plexus @can I don't actually think this shit sucks. Things are not that easy. Mind you, computers are a product of the military industrial complex in itself, and we were just lucky to be far away from WWII and the Manhattan Project that we could ignore and forget how all this stuff came to fruition in the first place.

There is no alternative to taking the world as it is when working on social change, though. It does not seem like a successful strategy to opt out of the technology everyone 1/

Show threadHans Hübner7h ago
@plexus @can else and our enemies use. You don't go to a gun fight with a knife as a weapon, even if you believe that guns should not exist in the first place.
Show threadcan5h ago
@hanshuebner @plexus I don't know what your point is?
Show threadHans Hübner5h ago
@can @plexus Sorry. I'm not great at words.
Show threadcan
@hanshuebner @plexus I think we all agree that this shit sucks and many of us are familiar with the history of modern computing. I disagree that workers of the software industry can't spark change. We are probably the most privileged of the working class. So I would even argue it's our duty to do something with this privelege...
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