I really disagree, programming is not dead. Far from it, we need skilled practitioners and designers now more than ever. I discussed this detail in The Decoherence Trap, which was trending for a minute there, but another (quicker) thing I’d recommend reading is my AI usage policy’s section on coding.
In short, if you don’t aggressively create and maintain solid, well thought out abstraction layers that are human driven, and only use AI at the edges, you’re going to find yourself in sleep walking into an unmaintainable mess sooner rather than later. We already struggled with decoherence and code maintainability prior to AI, and AI is only accelerating it.
I say this as an early adopter, having seen every strategy and idea play out. There simply is no way to prevent decoherence, and the faster and harder you push AI, the more decoherence it adds.
Anyways, take heart, there’s going to be plenty of slop for us to clean up for a very long time.
This might be a tangent to the main conversation, but I was wondering about your AI usage policy where you write:
As a coder, I do not think there is any ethical issue with using AI to write code (outside of environmental and societal impacts, see below)
Where do you stand on the licensing concerns of LLM output? I’m thinking specifically about papers like https://arxiv.org/html/2408.02487v3 that conclude:
Using LiCoEval, we evaluate 14 popular LLMs, finding that even top-performing LLMs produce a non-negligible proportion (0.88% to 2.01%) of code strikingly similar to existing open-source implementations. Notably, most LLMs fail to provide accurate license information, particularly for code under copyleft licenses.
From your other views, I feel like you probably think this is unethical, but it’s not clear from that line I quoted in your AI usage policy. Maybe you have an interesting take?
Ah, that is a good point, I will update to include a note on this.
I do believe that violating copyleft licenses is unethical, and non attribution is problematic. However, I also don’t believe in copyleft licenses (or any other forms of IP) as a general good structure. IP has been IMO a major source of decoherence in the economy writ large, and it’s one of the main issues that I will be tackling in the upcoming essay on Open Capital.
That said, it is unethical to not follow the structures a creator decides to impose on their work, and I believe it is neutral to choose a restrictive license (it’s not a right or wrong thing, as much as a right or left thing). I’m more so speaking at the macro level of economic outcomes, and the unintentional structures that restrictive licenses reinforce and validate.
(And to be clear, closed source systems are orders of magnitude worse and the real problem, IMO. Copyleft is just one attempt to break them open, and it doesn’t work)
I really disagree, programming is not dead. Far from it, we need skilled practitioners and designers now more than ever. I discussed this detail in The Decoherence Trap, which was trending for a minute there, but another (quicker) thing I’d recommend reading is my AI usage policy’s section on coding.
In short, if you don’t aggressively create and maintain solid, well thought out abstraction layers that are human driven, and only use AI at the edges, you’re going to find yourself in sleep walking into an unmaintainable mess sooner rather than later. We already struggled with decoherence and code maintainability prior to AI, and AI is only accelerating it.
I say this as an early adopter, having seen every strategy and idea play out. There simply is no way to prevent decoherence, and the faster and harder you push AI, the more decoherence it adds.
Anyways, take heart, there’s going to be plenty of slop for us to clean up for a very long time.
score 3 · canonical
This might be a tangent to the main conversation, but I was wondering about your AI usage policy where you write:
Where do you stand on the licensing concerns of LLM output? I’m thinking specifically about papers like https://arxiv.org/html/2408.02487v3 that conclude:
From your other views, I feel like you probably think this is unethical, but it’s not clear from that line I quoted in your AI usage policy. Maybe you have an interesting take?
score 1 · canonical
Ah, that is a good point, I will update to include a note on this.
I do believe that violating copyleft licenses is unethical, and non attribution is problematic. However, I also don’t believe in copyleft licenses (or any other forms of IP) as a general good structure. IP has been IMO a major source of decoherence in the economy writ large, and it’s one of the main issues that I will be tackling in the upcoming essay on Open Capital.
That said, it is unethical to not follow the structures a creator decides to impose on their work, and I believe it is neutral to choose a restrictive license (it’s not a right or wrong thing, as much as a right or left thing). I’m more so speaking at the macro level of economic outcomes, and the unintentional structures that restrictive licenses reinforce and validate.
(And to be clear, closed source systems are orders of magnitude worse and the real problem, IMO. Copyleft is just one attempt to break them open, and it doesn’t work)
score 1 · canonical
Ohh those are some interesting ideas! Thanks. I look forward to that blog post.
score 1 · canonical