This is the worst argument against “just a tool” I’ve heard.
You got me interested, so I read it. It’s good that the article is so short, it’s bad that there’s no actual argument there
Than I’m glad I didn’t waste too much of your time 🙂 There is an argument hidden in there, it is:
If your work isn’t about results anymore, but which tools you used, something is off and a tool isn’t just a tool anymore.
Especially if you’re forced to use something destructive like LLMs.
I felt like this was something meta, but thanks for putting it clearly. It is a reasonable observation, but I feel like it’s a bit tangential to tool being a tool and is more about the context luggage that a tool carries
Ah I see, you’re saying it’s not “just a tool” because there is a whole political thing in companies about being forced to use it, which doesn’t normally apply to ordinary tools.
You may be right but it’s kind of irrelevant. When people say “it’s just a tool” they’re trying to assert that it isn’t going to fundamentally change anything about our jobs or society. It’s “just a tool” like a debugger or an IDE or a static analyser.
Your argument doesn’t really say anything about that assertion. So you’re sort of right, but in a way that nobody cares about.
And for what it’s worth the “it’s just a tool and isn’t going to fundamentally change anything” people are very clearly delusional (or they haven’t used Codex in the last 6 months). There is absolutely no way this is “just a tool”. Most people I speak to really have stopped writing code by hand. It’s going to completely screw young people looking to get white collar jobs. A debugger never did that.
There have long been organizations which restrict extra operating systems or even vim, dumb as that is. Hasn’t changed. Some companies are strict about ai tools now too. Some have tight security about LLM gateways; others don’t. Some send date to big corpos; some don’t.
Yeah, this person never seems to have worked a company locked into Microsoft or Oracle or something.
If AI is “just a tool”, then guns are “just a tool”
So? Guns are tools designed specifically for killing. What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?
Both are true
I’m sorry but I have to disagree. Sometimes, unfortunately, guns are needed. For example, if a russian dictator decides to invade your country to wipe your culture. But LLMs and GenAI? Nobody asked for them and we’d be better off without those crappy. Just like with guns 🤪
Guess it’s just impossible to disentangle a tool’s existence in itself, with how it gets used. Police can use guns to address crime, so we don’t have to get robbed. But while at it, they can shoot way too many black people, as it seems to be the case in the US. Or they can do a better job. The tool doesn’t care. But those people will still be dead and that’s a shame. And with Putin, I’d argue we better find a way to tackle him other than send me over there with a gun in my hand. I’d really want to avoid that. And I didn’t ask for it, either.
So… I guess I have to disagree on the disagreement as well. There has to be a better way.
Calling vim a “simple text edtior” will certainly raise some eyebrows.
