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.

Okay friends, I am back at the hotel after a wonderful dinner with friends, both old and new, and before I go to sleep I wanted to talk about ConFoo.

On the one hand, it was great to be with lots of enthusiastic people who are interested in programming. As a staff-level engineer with almost 30 years of experience and having given talks for more than 20 years, I enjoy all the sharing and the conversations.

AI talks were everywhere, at least a third of all talks. People are excited and lots of examples of integrating this stuff.

But the AI stuff is very deeply personal for me because these companies stole my books and paid me nothing to use them. They are attempting to resell to others what they stole. I am not attempting to gatekeep people. If you want to use them, knock yourself out.

I am just disappointed at the overall lack of empathy being shown to folks like me who had their stuff stolen. Too many shrugs or weak comments.

You are not required to care about what happened to me. Just don’t be surprised at the frosty reception and comments you will get from me when you ask me to be impressed by what you have done with these tools.