> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible.
I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that.
What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it (granted, the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world).
And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers.
If anything, it seems like Balmers plea of "Developers, developers, developers" has came true, and if there will be one profession left in 100 year when AI does everything for us (if the vibers are to be believed), then that'd probably be software developers and machine learning experts.
What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing and been doing so for at least 20 years?
Across ~10 jobs or so, mostly as a employee of 5-100 person companies, sometimes as a consultant, sometimes as a freelancer, but always with a comfy paycheck compared to any other career, and never as taxing (mental and physical) as the physical labor I did before I was a programmer, and that some of my peers are still doing.
Of course, there is always exceptions, like programmers who need to hike to volcanos to setup sensors and what not, but generally, programmers have one of the most comfortable jobs on the planet today. If you're a programmer, I think it should come relatively easy to acknowledge this.
> programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it
Not in where I live though. Competition is fierce, both in industry and academia, for most posts being saturated and most employees face "HR optimization" in their late 30s. Not to mention working over time, and its physical consequences.
The job of a programmer is, and has always been, 50% making our job obsolete (through various forms of automation) and 50% ensuring our job security (through various forms of abstraction).
Again, sucks to be in the US as a programmer today maybe, but this isn't true elsewhere in the world, and especially not if you already have at least some experience.
> What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun)
You do realise your position of luck is not normal, right? This is not how your average Techie 2025 is.
I don't know what "position of luck" you're talking about, it's been dedicated effort to practice programming and suffer through a lot of shit until I got my first comfy programming job.
And even if I'm experienced now, I still have peers and acquaintances who are getting into the industry, I'm not sitting in my office with my eyes closed exactly.
Well, speaking just for central Europe, it is pretty average. Sure, entry-level positions are different story, but anyone with at least few years for work experience can find reasonably payed job fairly quickly.
> What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"?
I'm not paid enough to clean up shit after an AI. Behind an intern or junior? Sure, I enjoy that because I can tell them how shit works, where they went off the rails, and I can be sure they will not repeat that mistake and be better programmers afterwards.
But an AI? Oh good luck with that and good luck dealing with the "updates" that get forced upon you. Fuck all of that, I'm out.
> AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence.
Exactly. You can see that with the proliferation of chickenized reverse centaurs[1] in all kinds of jobs. Getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop is the aim now that bosses/stakeholders have seen the light.
I've seen the argument that computers let us prop up and even scale governmental systems that would have long since collapsed under their own weight if they’d remained manual more than once. I'm not sure I buy it, but computation undoubtedly shapes society.
The author does seem quite keen on computers, but they've been "getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop" for decades. I think there might be some unexamined bias here.
I'm not even saying the core argument's wrong, exactly - clearly, tools build systems ("...and systems kill" - Crass). I guess I'm saying tools are value neutral. Guns don't kill people. So this argument against LLMs is an argument against all tools, unless you can explain how LLMs are a unique category of tool?
I am surprised (and also kind of not) to see this kind of tech hate on HN of all places.
Would you prefer we heat our homes by burning wood, carry water from the nearby spring, and ride horses to visit relatives?
Progress is progress, and has always changed things. Its funny that apparently, "progressive" left-leaning people are actually so conservative at the core.
So far, in my book, the advancements in the last 100 or even more years have mostly always brought us things I wouldn't want to miss these days. But maybe some people would be happier to go back to the dark ages...
So, you want to rebel and stay as organic-minded human? But the what exactly is "being a human"?
The biological senses and abilities were constantly augmented throughput the centuries, pushing the organic human to hide inside deeper layers of what you call as yourself.
What's yourself without your material possessions and social connections? There is no such thing as yourself without these.
Now let's wind back. Why resist just one more layer of augmentation of our senses, mind and physical abilities?
I really enjoyed how your words made me _feel._ They encouraged me to "keep fighting the good fight" when it comes to avoiding social media, et. al.
I do Vibe Code occasionally, Claude did a decent job with Terraform and SaltStack recently, but the words ring true in my head about how AI weakens my thinking, especially when it comes to Python or any programming language. Tread carefully indeed. And reading a book does help - I've been tearing through the Dune books after putting them off too long at my brother's recommendation. Very interesting reflections in those books on power/human nature that may apply in some ways to our current predicament.
At any rate, thank you for the thoughtful & eloquent words of caution.
And then there is the moderate position: Don't be the person refusing the use a calculator / PC / mobile phone / AI. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. And carry on with your life.
As a crappy programmer I love AI! Right now I'm focusing on building up my Math knowledge, general CS knowledge and ML knowledge. In the future, knowing how to read code and understanding it may be more important than writing it.
I think its amazing what giant vector matrices can do with a little code.
If as the author suggests AI is inherently designed to further concentrate control and capital, that may be so, but that is also the aim of every business.
Everytime I read one of these "I don't use AI" posts, the content is either "my code is handcrafted in a mountain spring and blessed by the universe itself, so no AI can match it", or "everything different from what I do is technofascism or <insert politics rant here>". Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been; and sometimes code is just code, and AI is just a tool. What am I missing?
You are not missing much. Yes there will be situations where AI won’t be helpful, but that’s not a majority
Used right, Claude Code is actually very impressive. You just have to already be a programmer to use it right - divide the problem into small chunks yourself, instruct it to work on the small chunks.
Second example - there is a certain expectation of language in American professional communication. As a non native speaker I can tell you that not following that expectation has real impact on a career. AI has been transformational, writing an email myself and asking it to ‘make this into American professional english’
There's a lot of overlap between "AI is evil megacapitalism" and "AI is ineffective", and I never understood the latter, but I am increasingly arriving to the understanding that the latter claim isn't real, it's just a soldier in the war being fought over the former.
We shape the world through our choices, generally under the umbrella of deterministic systems. AI is non-deterministic, but instead amplifies the concerns by a few wealthy corporations / individuals.
So is AI effective at generating marketing material or propagating arguably vapid value systems in the face of ecological, cultural, and economic crisis? I'd argue yes. But effective also depends on an intention, and that's not my intention, so it's not as effective for me.
I think we need more "manual" choice, and more agency.
Not much. Even the argument that AI is another tool to strip people of power is not that great.
It's possible to use AI chatbots against the system of power, to help detect and point out manipulation, or lack of nuance in arguments, or political texts. To help decipher legalese in contracts, or point out problematic passages in terms of use. To help with interactions with the sate, even non-trivial ones like FOI requests, or disputing information disclosure rejections, etc.
AI tools can be used to help against the systems of power.
The big tech will build out compute in a never seen speed and we will reach 2e29 Flops faster than ever.
Big tech is competing with each other and they are the ones with the real money in our capitalistic world but even if they would find some slow down between each others, countries are also now competing.
In the next 4 years and the massive build out of compute, we will see a lot clearer how the progress will go.
And either we hit obvous limitations or not.
If we will not see an obvious limitation, fionas opinion will have 0 relevance.
The best chance for everyone is to keep a very very close eye on AI to either make the right decisions (not buying that house with a line of credit; creating your own product a lot faster thanks to ai, ...) or be aware what is coming.
> LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles
What a loaded sentence lol. Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive. And implying somehow anti-AI is progressive.
> AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.
Really? So we're not going to see AI users celebrating over how much less power DeepSeek used, right?
Anyway guess what else is resource intensive? Making chips. Follow the line of logic you will find computers consolidate powers and real progressive hackers should use pencil and paper only.
> Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive
I didn't read it that way. "Progressive hacker circles" doesn't imply that all hackers are progressive, it can just be distinguishing progressive circles from conservative ones.
> Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive
I mean, yeah, that kind of checks out. The quoted part doesn't make much sense to me, but that most hackers are progressives (as in "enact progress by change", not the twisted American version) should hardly come as a surprise. The opposite would be that a hacker could be a conservative (again, not the US version, but the global definition; "reluctant to change"), which is pretty much a oxymoron. Best would be to eschew political/ideological labels in total, and just say we hackers are unpolitical :)
Pro/regressive are terms that are highly contextual. Progress for progress’ sake alone can move anything forward. I would argue the progression of the attention economy has been extremely negative for most of the human race, yet that is “progressing.”
The typical CCC / Hackerspace - circle is kinda progressive / left leaning. At least in my experience. Which I think she(or he?) was implying. Of course not every hacker is :)
I don't think I'm going to take seriously an argument that uses Marx as its foundation but I'm glad that the pronouns crowd has had to move on from finger wagging as their only rhetorical stance.
> And yeah, I get it. We programmers are currently living through the devaluation of our craft, in a way and rate we never anticipated possible.
I'm a programmer, been coding professionally for 10 something years, and coding for myself longer than that.
What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun), and programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it (granted, the US seems to struggle with that specific point as of late, yet it remains true in the rest of the world).
And now, we're having a huge explosion of tools for developers, to build software that has to be maintained by developers, made by developers for developers.
If anything, it seems like Balmers plea of "Developers, developers, developers" has came true, and if there will be one profession left in 100 year when AI does everything for us (if the vibers are to be believed), then that'd probably be software developers and machine learning experts.
What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing and been doing so for at least 20 years?
> What exactly is being de-valuated for a profession that seems to be continuously growing
A lot of newly skilled job applicants can't find anything in the job market right now.
> programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks...
I don't know what kind of work you do but this depends a lot on what kind of projects you work on
Across ~10 jobs or so, mostly as a employee of 5-100 person companies, sometimes as a consultant, sometimes as a freelancer, but always with a comfy paycheck compared to any other career, and never as taxing (mental and physical) as the physical labor I did before I was a programmer, and that some of my peers are still doing.
Of course, there is always exceptions, like programmers who need to hike to volcanos to setup sensors and what not, but generally, programmers have one of the most comfortable jobs on the planet today. If you're a programmer, I think it should come relatively easy to acknowledge this.
> programmers should be some of the most worry-free individuals on this planet, the job is easy, well-paid, not a lot of health drawbacks if you have a proper setup and relatively easy to find a new job when you need it
Not in where I live though. Competition is fierce, both in industry and academia, for most posts being saturated and most employees face "HR optimization" in their late 30s. Not to mention working over time, and its physical consequences.
The job of a programmer is, and has always been, 50% making our job obsolete (through various forms of automation) and 50% ensuring our job security (through various forms of abstraction).
There’s been over 1 million people laid off in tech in the past 4 years
https://www.trueup.io/layoffs
Again, sucks to be in the US as a programmer today maybe, but this isn't true elsewhere in the world, and especially not if you already have at least some experience.
> What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"? I'm getting paid more than ever for a job I feel like I almost shouldn't get paid for (I'm just having fun)
You do realise your position of luck is not normal, right? This is not how your average Techie 2025 is.
I don't know what "position of luck" you're talking about, it's been dedicated effort to practice programming and suffer through a lot of shit until I got my first comfy programming job.
And even if I'm experienced now, I still have peers and acquaintances who are getting into the industry, I'm not sitting in my office with my eyes closed exactly.
Well, speaking just for central Europe, it is pretty average. Sure, entry-level positions are different story, but anyone with at least few years for work experience can find reasonably payed job fairly quickly.
Specially for new developers. Entry level jobs have practically evaporated.
> What are they talking about? What is this "devaluation"?
I'm not paid enough to clean up shit after an AI. Behind an intern or junior? Sure, I enjoy that because I can tell them how shit works, where they went off the rails, and I can be sure they will not repeat that mistake and be better programmers afterwards.
But an AI? Oh good luck with that and good luck dealing with the "updates" that get forced upon you. Fuck all of that, I'm out.
Are we living on the same planet?
> AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence.
Exactly. You can see that with the proliferation of chickenized reverse centaurs[1] in all kinds of jobs. Getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop is the aim now that bosses/stakeholders have seen the light.
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenize...
Now apply that thinking to computers. Or levers.
I've seen the argument that computers let us prop up and even scale governmental systems that would have long since collapsed under their own weight if they’d remained manual more than once. I'm not sure I buy it, but computation undoubtedly shapes society.
The author does seem quite keen on computers, but they've been "getting rid of the free-willed human in the loop" for decades. I think there might be some unexamined bias here.
I'm not even saying the core argument's wrong, exactly - clearly, tools build systems ("...and systems kill" - Crass). I guess I'm saying tools are value neutral. Guns don't kill people. So this argument against LLMs is an argument against all tools, unless you can explain how LLMs are a unique category of tool?
Sounds like Manna control system: https://marshallbrain.com/manna
I am surprised (and also kind of not) to see this kind of tech hate on HN of all places.
Would you prefer we heat our homes by burning wood, carry water from the nearby spring, and ride horses to visit relatives?
Progress is progress, and has always changed things. Its funny that apparently, "progressive" left-leaning people are actually so conservative at the core.
So far, in my book, the advancements in the last 100 or even more years have mostly always brought us things I wouldn't want to miss these days. But maybe some people would be happier to go back to the dark ages...
"You don't like $instance_of_X? You must want to get rid of all $X" has got to be one of the most intellectually lazy things you could say.
You don't like leaded gasoline? You must want us to walk everywhere. Come on...
So, you want to rebel and stay as organic-minded human? But the what exactly is "being a human"?
The biological senses and abilities were constantly augmented throughput the centuries, pushing the organic human to hide inside deeper layers of what you call as yourself.
What's yourself without your material possessions and social connections? There is no such thing as yourself without these.
Now let's wind back. Why resist just one more layer of augmentation of our senses, mind and physical abilities?
I really enjoyed how your words made me _feel._ They encouraged me to "keep fighting the good fight" when it comes to avoiding social media, et. al.
I do Vibe Code occasionally, Claude did a decent job with Terraform and SaltStack recently, but the words ring true in my head about how AI weakens my thinking, especially when it comes to Python or any programming language. Tread carefully indeed. And reading a book does help - I've been tearing through the Dune books after putting them off too long at my brother's recommendation. Very interesting reflections in those books on power/human nature that may apply in some ways to our current predicament.
At any rate, thank you for the thoughtful & eloquent words of caution.
And then there is the moderate position: Don't be the person refusing the use a calculator / PC / mobile phone / AI. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. And carry on with your life.
I’m genuinely not sure if that post is supposed to be some funny parody. Either way I did have a good laugh reading it.
As a crappy programmer I love AI! Right now I'm focusing on building up my Math knowledge, general CS knowledge and ML knowledge. In the future, knowing how to read code and understanding it may be more important than writing it.
I think its amazing what giant vector matrices can do with a little code.
If as the author suggests AI is inherently designed to further concentrate control and capital, that may be so, but that is also the aim of every business.
The main thing is everyone seems to hate reading someone else ChatGPT while we are still eager to share ours to others as it’s some sort of oracle.
Does the author feel the same way of running the models locally?
Everytime I read one of these "I don't use AI" posts, the content is either "my code is handcrafted in a mountain spring and blessed by the universe itself, so no AI can match it", or "everything different from what I do is technofascism or <insert politics rant here>". Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been; and sometimes code is just code, and AI is just a tool. What am I missing?
You are not missing much. Yes there will be situations where AI won’t be helpful, but that’s not a majority
Used right, Claude Code is actually very impressive. You just have to already be a programmer to use it right - divide the problem into small chunks yourself, instruct it to work on the small chunks.
Second example - there is a certain expectation of language in American professional communication. As a non native speaker I can tell you that not following that expectation has real impact on a career. AI has been transformational, writing an email myself and asking it to ‘make this into American professional english’
> Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been;
The entire open source movement would like a word with you.
> What am I missing?
The youthful desire to rage against the machine?
I prefer eternally enslaving a machine to do my bidding over just raging at them.
There's a lot of overlap between "AI is evil megacapitalism" and "AI is ineffective", and I never understood the latter, but I am increasingly arriving to the understanding that the latter claim isn't real, it's just a soldier in the war being fought over the former.
I read the intersection as this:
We shape the world through our choices, generally under the umbrella of deterministic systems. AI is non-deterministic, but instead amplifies the concerns by a few wealthy corporations / individuals.
So is AI effective at generating marketing material or propagating arguably vapid value systems in the face of ecological, cultural, and economic crisis? I'd argue yes. But effective also depends on an intention, and that's not my intention, so it's not as effective for me.
I think we need more "manual" choice, and more agency.
Exactly.
Not much. Even the argument that AI is another tool to strip people of power is not that great.
It's possible to use AI chatbots against the system of power, to help detect and point out manipulation, or lack of nuance in arguments, or political texts. To help decipher legalese in contracts, or point out problematic passages in terms of use. To help with interactions with the sate, even non-trivial ones like FOI requests, or disputing information disclosure rejections, etc.
AI tools can be used to help against the systems of power.
Its ignorant. Thats what it is.
The big tech will build out compute in a never seen speed and we will reach 2e29 Flops faster than ever.
Big tech is competing with each other and they are the ones with the real money in our capitalistic world but even if they would find some slow down between each others, countries are also now competing.
In the next 4 years and the massive build out of compute, we will see a lot clearer how the progress will go.
And either we hit obvous limitations or not.
If we will not see an obvious limitation, fionas opinion will have 0 relevance.
The best chance for everyone is to keep a very very close eye on AI to either make the right decisions (not buying that house with a line of credit; creating your own product a lot faster thanks to ai, ...) or be aware what is coming.
Thanks for the fish and enjoy the ride.
> LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles
What a loaded sentence lol. Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive. And implying somehow anti-AI is progressive.
> AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.
Really? So we're not going to see AI users celebrating over how much less power DeepSeek used, right?
Anyway guess what else is resource intensive? Making chips. Follow the line of logic you will find computers consolidate powers and real progressive hackers should use pencil and paper only.
> Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive
I didn't read it that way. "Progressive hacker circles" doesn't imply that all hackers are progressive, it can just be distinguishing progressive circles from conservative ones.
> Implying being a hacker has some correlation with being progressive
I mean, yeah, that kind of checks out. The quoted part doesn't make much sense to me, but that most hackers are progressives (as in "enact progress by change", not the twisted American version) should hardly come as a surprise. The opposite would be that a hacker could be a conservative (again, not the US version, but the global definition; "reluctant to change"), which is pretty much a oxymoron. Best would be to eschew political/ideological labels in total, and just say we hackers are unpolitical :)
Pro/regressive are terms that are highly contextual. Progress for progress’ sake alone can move anything forward. I would argue the progression of the attention economy has been extremely negative for most of the human race, yet that is “progressing.”
The typical CCC / Hackerspace - circle is kinda progressive / left leaning. At least in my experience. Which I think she(or he?) was implying. Of course not every hacker is :)
Its interesting how people are still very positive about Marx’s labour theory of value, despite it being very much of its time and very discredited.
I don't think I'm going to take seriously an argument that uses Marx as its foundation but I'm glad that the pronouns crowd has had to move on from finger wagging as their only rhetorical stance.