Post #261497
2026-02-06 23:47 UTC
Replies (19)
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@fancysandwiches@neuromatch.social 2026-02-07 00:00
@vie@hachyderm.io I'm sure I don't truly know, but I think that it's essentially a form of short sighted eagerness, combined with imposter syndrome. They feel like they're able to do things they could not do before, and they want to be the first/most eager to do it because they feel like that will keep their job secure. But really, if your whole job can be automated with an LLM what incentive is there to keep you? What value are you providing if you don't understand what the code being produced does?
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@bjb@fosstodon.org 2026-02-07 00:03
@vie@hachyderm.io You're hanging out with a different bunch of software engineers than I am.
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@nicuveo@tech.lgbt 2026-02-07 00:15
@vie@hachyderm.io i wonder why that's the case, but yeah i've observed that too. my gut feeling is that code is extremely predictable, so LLMs are better at that than they are at other things, making them more enticing? and then the chatbot psychosis sets in.
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@jason@xr0.org 2026-02-07 00:22
I've had a theory for a few years that most software engineers don't actually like software engineering. Had there not been money in it they would have followed a different career path instead of getting a CS degree from a 4-year college (or boot camps). LLMs align with this theory. The people who are excited that something else is doing their job for them are the same people who picked the job for the salary, not the joy.
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@bks@mastodon.social 2026-02-07 00:22
@vie@hachyderm.io Computer Maoism. It's endemic in Silicon Valley.
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@Andrev@types.pl 2026-02-07 00:41
@vie@hachyderm.io I feel like LLM only exacerbate a situation that already existed: There are artisans, and there are workers. The artisans build things out of their craft, and the outcome benefits from decades of accumulated experience. The workers perform a task at hand, moving boxes from A to B, mainly worried about the outcome of not having box A not reach B in time. Speed and compliance is key in a competitive environment like that one. It's always been hard for artisans to find work in an industry hungry for workers. And it's been tough for workers to outcompete each other in speed and price. Coding agents provide workers with the unprecedented ability to clone themselves, sometimes many times, and get many boxes moved from point A to point B. Because what they sell is task completion and not craftsmanship it doen't matter in what way the work is done. And the industry never cared in the first place. There might be a world where agent orchestration will become a form of craft, and the ones diving deep right now will have a head start in this industry. Or maybe not and it's all just hype, smoke and mirror. there is no way to tell. I'm happy with my craft, even though it's never been recognised as such and never will. I wish good luck to those surrendering their skills to the whims of large undemocratic corporations.
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@cap_ybarra@beige.party 2026-02-07 00:53
@vie@hachyderm.io huge ratio of opportunists in the field who never liked the job to begin with and just were looking to cash out. they would have been in finance in the 80s but tech is where the money is today
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@barnaby@hachyderm.io 2026-02-07 01:12
@vie@hachyderm.io create something new. "It" can't.
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@thezerobit@anticapitalist.party 2026-02-07 01:31
@vie@hachyderm.io Every time something dumb happens in software engineering, I feel like my value goes up. Other people losing braincells from LLMs? More braincells for me. I think that's how it works. Among my coworkers, very few seem to be advocates so much as cautious adopters. Not a lot of class consciousness or solidarity in this industry.
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@steppe_lord@darksavantcrusaders.org 2026-02-07 01:31
@vie@hachyderm.io tech workers are probably the sector of the economy with the most temporarily embarrassed millionaires, of course most of them would hold the tech in high regard, if not for coping with the usual phrase "AI won't replace you, a programmer using AI will". As a "builder" "indie hacker" with "entrepreneurial" mindset it must be hard to deal with the cognitive dissonance of both believing this tool you use is so good it will replace large swaths of the workforce but also coming to terms that the most work you do is prompting and that you too, may be as "expendable" as the other people. Also, this is biased as I avoid reading xitter, but I've seen most boosters are wealthy programmers, i.e. they worked in the sector when software engineers were the darlings of the working class, and made their riches when they were seen as indispensable. Of course 10 years later they're not worried about juniors or the future of the profession, they have their life solved.
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@zehata@hachyderm.io 2026-02-07 01:35
saruman mentality
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@lain_7@tldr.nettime.org 2026-02-07 01:41
@vie@hachyderm.io The hand-tool artisans look down on the users of power tools, with some justice. But it could be that the two sets of people have different goals. For the artisans, it is the process itself. The constructed artifact exists primarily to embody the care and skill that went into its construction. For the power-tools user, perhaps their goal is a shelf to store the books they were able to read because of the time they did not spend in the workshop.
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@cargot_robbie@urbanists.social 2026-02-07 01:43
@vie@hachyderm.io Essentially yes. I might argue that the overall industry in which software developers work functions to undermine labour power, and has for long time ☹️ I'm a former software developer and I left in part because of my discomfort with the lack of thought or support offered to those whose jobs get automated. I think the industry selects for a specific individualistic mindset, whether intentionally or not, and I don't find the lack of solidarity or caution surprising 😮💨
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@htpcnz@mastodon.social 2026-02-07 02:00
@vie@hachyderm.io well the "senior" ones usually think only the juniors will get replaced... Thus as a bonus they won't have to deal with any juniors... As if any management wants to keep the most highly paid around to babysit their BS generators.
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@budududuroiu@hachyderm.io 2026-02-07 02:08
@vie@hachyderm.io most modern software engineering is thin layers of logic plumbing together different SaaS providers. Your boss will never let you self-host Postgres because he thinks it's cheaper to get an SLA from GCP. It's boring, repetitive, soulless. I'm not surprised people would be eager to turn it into an assembly line of PR reviews instead of writing code. Also, engineers are very competitive, and most think of themselves as special, that's why unionisation has been historically low in SWE. They're not thinking "AI will take my job", they're thinking "how can I use this LLM to outperform my colleague, get him fired, and get his bonus".
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@dmetzgar@fosstodon.org 2026-02-07 02:16
@vie@hachyderm.io I'm no fan. But years ago we had the whole copy-paste from Stack Overflow as the bad habit of SEs. I think of LLMs as slightly better at copy-paste. I use it in small quantities and fix what it gives me. It saves me time. And it's helpful for researching brownfield codebases. It lies, convincingly, but it gives me an attack angle. I do get unreasonably upset at people using AI to generate documentation and then just checking it in without reviewing it. That's almost worse than no docs.
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@juliangonggrijp@ieji.de 2026-02-07 02:19
@vie@hachyderm.io I think part of the logic is that a lot of developers have low self-confidence. If you believe that you're not as good as your peers, it seems attractive to defer part of the work to a machine that presents all its answers with certainty. It lessens your perceived burden and you can lean on its apparent confidence. It's actually bluffing away, an unreliable source compared to intentionally written documentation and a much worse programmer than the nonconfident human, but when you lack confidence, this is harder to recognize. It's a sad vicious cycle where the nonconfident becomes dependent and even less confident as a result. However, I think we need to recognize these people as victims of a trap rather than blaming them for it. It's mainly the marketing rhetoric of the genAI vendors that is at fault. The "mystery AI hype theater", as @emilymbender@dair-community.social aptly calls it. Tip for all humans: "On Confidence" from The School of Life is a sweet, smart, funny, heart-warming little book that you can read in an hour. It might also boost your confidence a bit. Buy multiple copies, give it away to friends and colleagues, bring it to work, on your travels and to the toilet, read it multiple times. One of the best books I've read. https://www.theschooloflife.com/shop/tsol-press-on-confidence/ #genAI #programming #confidence #SchoolOfLife
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@skylark13@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-02-07 02:20
@vie@hachyderm.io I think you probably see another crowd than I do, or I'm in a bubble that resembles my own views, or something. Because what I see (and my own position) is that software engineers of experience recognize them as tech debt accelerators and a massive security risk, and want as little to do with them as possible. For my part, I am already saying that if things really do go the way of more LLMs everywhere, I will be considering a very early retirement. I do not want to pick up that mess.
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@lispi314@udongein.xyz 2026-02-07 02:53
@vie@hachyderm.io It's worth noticing that the ones most enthusiastic about it are also the ones that care the least about their craft and were only ever in it because it was a well-paying job (in some places, they wouldn't have chosen it otherwise). That's not a coincidence.