Anna Maniscalco 🦀 🏳️‍⚧️

So when people talk about AI there's a lot of discussion on whether it works, whether it is a tool, whether it is not and whatnot.
I'm frankly tired of hearing all of this.
I don't care about any of it because the simple truth is that I don't want it.
We are humans, we don't just do things because they have purpose. You are gonna reach the leaves of the tree if you follow through the branches hard enough and you need to ask what's the purpose of it all.
To me the answer is that we are humans with feelings and are driven by arbitrary and irrational impulses that where carefully chosen by nature over millions of years to keep things balanced.
I don't write code to reach some goal, I write code because it's my craft and I feel fulfilled in taking care of some project, exploring knowledge, experimenting. By the time I see the final result the path to get there has taught me new aspects of math or some algorithm or whatever and I feel like I'm expanding.
A tool that promises to do this for me is simply undersiderable.
It takes something I love doing and makes it less interesting and less valuable to me as a person.
When I wrote code I write it my own way, someone that has worked with me for long enough might even recognize my code just by reading it sometimes.
If an LLM is doing that typing for me then that code won't be mine the same way.
Even if the LLM gets the job done I'm still not happy with the output because it won't be written the way I would have and I won't feel as comfortable working on a codebase the same I would have if I had proper control over it.
All of this matters.
I keep hearing from people around me that the companies they work for are now forcing them to use those "tools" because it maximes some shallow metric of productivity. It is truly sad and depressing because it effectively forces them not to care.
It feels like yet another capitalistic fever dream of maximizing some number at the expense of many other metrics which aren't modeled in the simplistic charts they look at. Yet our brain goes beyond those metrics and that's why to many of us it all feels wrong and dehumanising even if we can't always put our finger on why. That feeling does point at something real, just because it is too complex to put on a 2d chart doesn't mean it's not there.
I don't think it is sustainable, the world is made of humans and humans are maintaining the machinery that keeps making them money. If they make everyone depressed, even if they get a 10x boost in the lines/h that their developers put out or whatever, it's all inevitably going to collapse under it's weight.