No, I didn't. I claimed that if my coding ability atrophies, I expect that my ability to code through LLMs will decrease. And this is an outcome I want to avoid for the stated reasons and others.

That said, I get your point: maybe "the thing writing the code" will be as abstract as "the thing moving the electricity through transistors" at some point. And maybe I will be wrong about coding skill translating to good agent-herding skill. But I don't think I'm wrong now.

First, I like programming and don't want to stop doing it just because a machine can do it too. Second, I'm pretty sure atrophied coding skills will make me worse at directing the machines, thus worse at what seems to be "the job" these days.

I just checked LinkedIn and they have quite a few job listings in this vein. Which makes sense: in the "AI and YOLO" development lifecycle, automated testing is more important than ever.

Maybe it becomes normal to fork a project and vibe-code the extra thing you want and everybody does that and it's fine?

Doesn't seem like a loss for the project, just a win for you. If I understood the announcement correctly, they're doing this more for logistical reasons than to outright ban all AI-assisted code, so if something turns out to be super awesome then it's not like they have to do a clean-room reimplementation.

Meanwhile, let a thousand forks bloom, why not?

Yes, but it's not ever too much code for a team to understand, or a community. The question is whether you can build a team or community with enough trust and integrity that two things are always true:

1. Alice understands the fluxtron renoberator module she wrote.

2. Bob can also shift his attention there and understand it if necessary, because Alice writes clean code that was reviewed by John and Sally.

You can have Alice, Bob, John and Sally all be robots, and you can decide to trust the robots, but (so far anyway) it's a choice, not an inevitability.

I recently started using Claude to write an app. I was going to write it by hand but was having trouble getting motivated, and I knew I had to "up my game" in the vibecodery anyway. So far it's been a lot of back and forth, I keep the leash pretty short because I don't want The Claude AI you see everywhere now.

But even with good intentions and the short leash, I find myself saying "yeah, whatever, it looks like it did what I told it to do" and not actually reading all the code. Some yes, all no. And this is for my own project, nobody is my boss here, and it's nothing I couldn't have done by myself.

Now imagine the incentives for someone who's doing it for money, whose boss is pushing them to do more AI and not less, who probably doesn't actually know how to do all the things the AI is doing for them, who looks around and sees who's getting promoted and who's getting laid off...

And remember that most of us, most of the time, no matter how much we might love computers and software, are that person.

But hey, it could be worse! Have you heard about the Literacy Crisis?

https://ol-cartoon.de/

I prompted ChatGPT: Make a cartoon in the style of "Die Mütter vom Kollwitzplatz"

What it generated looks nothing like OL's work at all, so short of the lame attempt at copying his humor and the correct setting in Berlin, the only way you would ever confuse it for an original is...

...by the quite authentic "OL" signature ChatGPT rendered in the bottom right.

I saved the proof but am not posting it anywhere. You can probably generate the same thing yourself. Below is a rambling discussion with ChatGPT about it.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6ac4d10f-9a70-83ec-ac39-7f80c6cc63...

With AI?

As the API provider, I would be very happy to consider myself compliant based on this. But I have a feeling it wouldn't fly in Brussels.

[0]: I was just in the EU and got a chuckle out of the "AI disclaimer" coming at the end of every second advertisement, soon to be every advertisement.

It's so normalized there that I wonder whether this is a particularly Spanish habit. Maybe there are a bunch of countries where people routinely leave each other voice recordings on WhatsApp/Messenger/etc, and I just haven't been to them yet.