No Man Is an Island

I really enjoyed this article. I do tend to think of myself as someone intrinsically motivated but I do love to share my work and if there's no audience for it or chances to cooperate on software with like-minded individuals, that's a sad state indeed. If the future of FOSS is just random drive-by PRs generated by LLMs, how lonely a prison we've developed for ourselves...

Eh, I didn't really like this post. Chiefly, because it feels like the author picked a conclusion that hasn't come to pass yet ("AI will make all coding / intellectual work / blogging / paper writing stop completely") and taking it as fact argues backwards how terrible that'll be. And, like, yes, I don't want us to reach that world either.

But I also don't really feel like that's the direction we're heading? Even at my super AI-bullish company nobody is saying "do black-box development and let the AI do it all". We are expected to know how they work and strongly encouraged to use it, but there is still the understanding that we "own" the code and are expected to understand and maintain it. I understand that's an n = 1 anecdote, but it's not like OP's arguments are on any stronger foundations.

With Math, I'm seeing a strong pushback as well, as mathematicians point out that LLMs may confirm the truthfulness of statements, but their raw proofs aren't nearly as useful as one constructed by a person.

"You write a blog post: who’s going to read it?" / "You design a revolutionary new programming language: who cares?" / "You write a library, and publish it on GitHub: who cares?" This question trio is what ultimately prompted me to write this comment, because I find it frankly a little ridiculous. Even if the current anti-AI sentiment wanes (which is very much not a foregone conclusion yet), people will always want to read cool writeups and hand-tinker on stuff.

Now they talk about “prompts”, “harnesses”, “loops”. The discourse is narrower, shallower, and more repetitive. There’s only so many times I can hear about “agentic harnesses” before I lose my mind.

This one I'll give to the author. I also experience it and it gives me such fatigue. The constant churn of "you need to use BowelMovement-Sloptastic-420-69-QED with this particular fork of vllm.cpp or else you're missing out" or "BigModel 10.5 does 10 points higher on the benchmarks than LargeModel 7.7, but LargeModel 7.7 is much cheaper, so you should still use it"...

It's like people are discussing Pokémon or something. And not even just the base game, but minmaxing some artificially kneecapped challenge.