Comment by dang
Comment by dang 13 hours ago
[stub for offtopicness]
Comment by dang 13 hours ago
[stub for offtopicness]
Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how much you dislike an article.
You may not owe programming heroes or Linkedin inluencers better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
I used to aspire to reach the same and now I lose a bit more respect with their every drag of the AI-pipe.
How big of a Carmack fan are you really, if you don't know one of his most well known takes on programming? (And you definitely don't need to be a fan.) Carmack has been heavily in favor of leveraging power tools since way back.
Direct quote from the man himself:
> I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers.
> My first games involved hand assembling machine code and turning graph paper characters into hex digits. Software progress has made that work as irrelevant as chariot wheel maintenance.
> Building power tools is central to all the progress in computers.
> Game engines have radically expanded the range of people involved in game dev, even as they deemphasized the importance of much of my beloved system engineering.
> AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics.
> Yes, we will get to a world where you can get an interactive game (or novel, or movie) out of a prompt, but there will be far better exemplars of the medium still created by dedicated teams of passionate developers.
> The world will be vastly wealthier in terms of the content available at any given cost.
I've seen that before. Re-reading it, I don't really get the same "vibe" as antirez's level of AI advocacy. You also conveniently omitted the last paragraph of the tweet:
> Will there be more or less game developer jobs? That is an open question. It could go the way of farming, where labor saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone, or it could be like social media, where creative entrepreneurship has flourished at many different scales. Regardless, “don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.
But yeah, it (almost) sounds like an ad for AI, but I like to believe it's still a measured somewhat neutral stance. The difference is that Carmack doesn't consistently post things like this unprompted, unlike antirez.
An influencer, who could more than likely blow 99% of us out of the water when it comes to programming by hand with absolutely no tooling, at whatever level of abstraction. Same probably applies to Antirez.
In case you didn’t know, Linus does vibe code now:
This is why you should never meet--nor listen too much--to your heroes.
I feel slightly disappointed. At the same time nobody is obliged to live like the public (or his "fans") think that person should live.
You either die as a programmer hero or live long enough to be a Linkedin-style influencer.
On a more serious note, the technology & its use cases of AI are pretty dividing especially within software engineering. I would consider the fact that the financial incentives driving it and the what ~3 TRILLION $ invested in AI driving up some of this divide too.
How many times are we going to reinvent the wheel of LLM usage and applaud? Why every day is there another LLM usage article adding essentially nothing educational or significant to the discourse voted to the top of the frontpage? Am I just jaded? It feels like the bar for "Successful article on Hacker News" is so much lower for LLM discourse than for any other subject
This was just such a worthless post that it made me sad. No arguments with moral weight or clarity. Just another hollowed out shell beeping out messages of doom...
How does it feel to see all your programming heroes turn into Linkedin-style influencers?