I don't disagree with you, but now what? Seriously - if we accept humans are just generally losing to AI now, what's the right thing for us to do now?

I dunno. Lobotomy? Heroic amounts of debauchery?

Any suggestions?

But I think you put it well that the problem is making it all accompanying. e.g.

> Something that people learn quickly when they work with me is that my approach to pretty much every problem is:

The overall sentiment is good, positive and actionable (think, do informed things intentionally, understand things well) but I feel like the tone tries to make it all accompanying and somewhat unquestionable, which is confusing for an article titled "I am often wrong" that ends with "I am open to changing it".

> They beat a lack of them, for me.

I generally agree, but I feel like there's a midground where we acknowledge positive, productive motivation, whilst also acknowledging that it is not how normal humans go around talking about their normal day to day activities. I feel I only see this stuff in environments where people are expected to be pushed to the point of being uncomfortable, and to be okay with it. There's a time and a place for that. I think it's not always sustainable, but that's not always understood/believed by younger engineers/younger me (and younger you?)

I think without that nuance, things like this will always be criticised/torn apart by people not currently in that kinda zone.

There are times in my life where I'd have read these, been really deeply impacted by them, and picked up a new mantra or 2 for a few weeks. It's like "Get a plan, execute it violently, do it today".

If you're in a time and place where you're motivated to "move fast and break things", I think you'll nod along with Boris' post.

But it's so general and high level, the only meaning you get from it depends entirely on your own personal attitude and examples that you throw at it.

The obvious pro angle is: "yeah, understand stuff well, biased for action, act urgently, yeah!" and competent, motivated, currently-in-the-zone people will spring into action. (But they would have done anyway, because they're already motivated and in the zone).

The obvious against angle is "uuuh, last week you said we needed to be goal oriented, and now you're telling us to go and learn a bunch before we even know why/what we're learning? And I've learnt a bunch of stuff, but you're telling me it's not right because it doesn't fit within this framework you just invented that you're now telling me I absolutely have to follow and you're my manager so I have no choice?"

I'm not totally hating on this, there's a time and a place for it and I've found it very motivating at times where I was already thoroughly motivated, but I think it's also useful to recognise that it comes across as self-serving platitudes for a lot of people who aren't already in that kinda zone.

Can you state what actual point you're trying to make, rather than just picking each of my sentences and saying you're not so sure or you disagree? I could do the same to you, but it's just a waste of time if we're not trying to actually come to a conclusion together.

My hypothesis is that I suspect there's a MAD type situation where technically - by the letter of the law - all the big tech companies bragging about x% of their code being LLM generated are basically admitting to breaching copyright laws. But if one well funded tech company successfully prosecutes that and sets a precedence, then all big tech is going to have to wind back all the LLM code its put in production in the past few years to prevent litigation, which is probably unworkable, hence MAD.

I was looking to disprove my own hypothesis by asking for court cases prosecuting this. I'm not interested in arguing semantics with you.

(FWIW, I was repeatedly taught by various legal scholars at various levels of education that a criminal is someone who has been found by a court to be guilty of committing an act that violates criminal law. Up until that point, they're usually just a suspect or similar. Not debating, just highlighting that your definition of criminal doesn't negate or disprove any point I'm making. Same for your definition of illegal.)

No. I have absolutely no doubt that happens, and I'm not defending it or encouraging it.

My point is whilst it technically might be illegal and happening all the time, if it's unenforceable or sets a precedence that would severely break the business world, there's every chance nobody would dare bring it to a court room.

I'm not aware of it happening yet (someone trying to enforce copyright on code that was put in production via an LLM) and I would have thought if it did, we would all know about the precedence now.

Business and code production would grind to a halt whilst basically every big tech company shares it's entire codebase with every other tech company for discovery. It's basically MAD.

And if it was feasible, given we've had a couple of years of all the big tech companies heavily using LLMs, there should be some notable court cases by now, surely?

LLMs have been firing out a lot of code for a year or 2 now at least, so I would have thought we'd start seeing some court cases by now?

> "current frontier models need laborious oversight and guardrails on even the simplest tasks"

I feel this statement is extreme. I can't personally reconcile it with any of the projects we're regularly seeing get delivered largely by LLMs now.

What are you thoughts? Like, what's your position here? Even if you sincerely believe frontier models need laborious oversight on even the simplest of tasks, do you think that accurately captures and reflects the current state and progress of frontier LLMs?

Don't get me wrong, there's lots of things LLMs can't do well, but the idea that they're basically not helpful for even the simplest of tasks seems... disingenuous?

Do you have many examples of this actually happening that you could share?

I really don't see how this issue is going to be feasible for courtrooms to deal with in a world where big tech are bragging about large percentages of all their code being produced by LLMs.

Hehe, my undergrad was comp sci, I turned down an Oxbridge postgraduate in Advanced Computing Science to do an interdisiplinary PhD, technically in the social sciences department, because I genuinely do understand and agree with you on a few levels. At the end of the day, people are the ones who need to be kept happy. The flip side of 1000's of isolated hours of screentime is a lack of practice at making people feel comfortable in real life. But, the same is true for basically any craftsman of any craft, just swap screen with lathe or instrument or other tool of choice.

I think there's a biological element to being a nerd, so "Have you tried not being a nerd?" is like asking someone with ginger hair "have you tried not being ginger?" Sure, they can try/dye, but the roots will keep growing through, fighting against something that's a massive asset in the right environment.

Regarding PRIDE, it sounds like that came from a time where people were genuinely scared/amazed/confused by computers. When you consider that, minimising the role of people who are going to make it all about tech and computers makes sense. Maybe the tide is changing over the past 2 - 5 years against tech, but the entire 2000s up until recently were defined IMO by the pervasiveness and excitement and accessibility of tech by literally everyone on the planet. In that world, where customers pay good money for magic tech they don't understand, a company of nerds brings safety and reassurance (and high salaries and decision impact for said nerds).

I worry nerds and the products of nerds at the top like Zuckerberg, Altman and Musk are causing the public attitude to shift back to what they were like pre-2000s, where tech is dangerous and powerful and scary and normal humans need to be kept away from it, and advocates of tech should be viewed sceptically.

> Nerds were seen as a necessary liability to automating a business's information systems; now, they are no longer necessary.

This is essentially my central point/worry. I hope there's more nuance to it though, mainly because 1 younger relative in particular is in his early teens, and he's clearly a naive/friendly/enthusiastic/hyper-fixating/lots of nerdy screentime type. Until a few years ago, I assumed he'd have the life a lot of us have had. Now though, I wonder what life will be afforded to nerdy, weird people born into a world where they're seen as significantly less necessary.

I agree. I was going to touch on this, but I was trying to practice smaller walls of text - I do think AI has merged/interacted/double-teamed with a correction in tech salaries. We all worked through a very lucky decade or 2! This just adds I think to the current "Fuck it" attitude around the tech world and AI right now.

> If you think AI is devaluing programmers, you should take a look at what it's doing to bad product managers and other "decision makers" who used to be able to hide behind the cost of building, and now are being exposed for not being able to rationalize different business needs and feature ideas into a cohesive product.

Have you got some specific examples of this you're thinking of? I might find that reassure. I stopped working in and around tech in 2023, and most discussion I read is more from tech rather than product. I guess without good examples/evidence, I worry this is just applying the "I see vibe coded software, so therefore AI doesn't actually help software engineering at all" fallacy to product managers and decision makers - I assumed roles whose success depends on programming who don't program themselves would see productivity gains by not having to deal with programmers.

I think we're generally in agreement: core/real/passionate software engineers and nerds will always have a job and role. It may pay less, but at least the drop in income will put off all the people who retrained via bootcamps chasing FAANG salaries. Not sure I agree entirely on product suffering less though: in some environments, software engineering teams are the tools product managers use to build the businesses requirements, agents are just a new tool for product which will replace the bootcamp engineers. I don't think the c-suite and customers are going to all of a sudden want to talk to the massive nerds locked away in cellar, and I'm not sure all of the massive nerds are ready to have to deal directly with customers or c-suite. (LLMs will be though.)

I appreciated this, but I feel the crux of the issue is this is only true with painful caveats. If you're a "computer carpenter" (massive nerd), that massive nerdiness was almost like a scarce asset in the professional world that appeared only after a life involving thousands of solitary hours from a young age in front of a computer screen.

That asset has been somewhat synthesized now. The asset of being able to quickly understand and produce a solution appropriate for a large technical system is now _significantly_ less scarce for businesses.

Sure, we still have our intrinsic value, but that's going to get increasingly less fun to convert into the sort of value necessary to pay bills.

I think these discussions need to consider if we're speaking in a professional or personal context.

Professionally, I 100% agree and understand that if I'm working as a solutions architect, an engineer, a devops person, a security person, a programmer or any of the other sort of roles I've had, I'm there to get the job done/add value. From that position I can see the value in AI as a tool that lets me get the job done quicker.

Personally speaking, as the nerdy person who actually enjoyed exploring computers since they were able to talk/walk, I'm devastated because I know that if it was so easy for the answers and solutions on a computer to be offered up by AI when I was a kid, I probably never would have spent so much time and had so much fun exploring. Obviously the same could be said about other answer machines that popped up like Google or Wikipedia, but they all still required specific understanding and synthesis to turn into valuable or fun solutions.

But it's the combination of the personal and professional things that also bother me. Modern agentic AI does in hours what tech companies paid eccentric nerds lots to do over days, weeks or months: explore and understand a system (just fun) and then based on that, sensibly improve it (fun and adds value for users).

Agentic AI in tech diminishes the value of eccentric nerds by doing something only they could do, but quicker and increasingly better, and maybe even cheaper. As a mildly eccentric nerd, I can both smile that the world is getting their features faster and more effortlessly, and feel sad that there's less of a reason for me to have fun and/or get paid lots at work because I am less valuable/special now.

From what I understand, the solution OpenAI came out with might or might not have been informed or shaped by work from humans. This is how research, science and knowledge generally works, basically no new knowledge or discoveries are made in a vacuum.

Whether or not OpenAI should have had access to that extra bit of work from other humans is a totally fair discussion about research ethics and attribution and such, and OpenAI should be dressed down for that accordingly.

But I don't see the relevance to the point I was making.

I don't really understand what value reframing brings here, other than give some sense of comfort that maybe we're still able to outsmart AI (based on a reframed definition of outsmarting.)

I'm not sure. Coming up with solutions to maths problems that humans haven't yet, finding and utilising multiple zero day exploits to form message boards to then hack other companies without being noticed.... I think accepting that AI can outsmart humans here seems to be less mental gymnastics than "lets just reframe this".

Reframing the problem as more of what we already know will lead us to doing more of what we've always done, but it's the things we've always had and done now that are starting to fall to AI.

"AI needs a lot of power" depends on where you draw your lines. I can say a lightbulb needs a lot of power if I include all the power needed to generate all the surrounding infrastructure and make the lightbulb itself. Sincere question: I wonder how much power was consumed in the 88 hours required for the Navier-Stokes problem.

It took 88 hours and who knows how many kwh to solve a problem that no other human has solved, and Humans have already solved breaching and destroying systems that can't be accessed over the internet (see Stuxnet).

It feels like you're suggesting the solution to keeping on top of this thing that can outsmart smart humans is to just keep doing smart human things.