Personal take: AI (LLM)

I'm tired of all this panic surrounding me, regarding AI coding assistants, or just AI in general. What happened? We've been 6 months away from losing our jobs for about 3 years now and it's not looking like i'm producing apps that much faster, or that i'm losing my job anytime soon for that matter. Don't give me that. Listen, if you don't know a tech stack, having Claude know the technicalities is not going to get you out of a jam when the codebase eventually grinds to a halt, except by -guess what-... another big bunch of prompting Claude, because the mess that only Claude made, only Claude can fix. Don't you realize? It's you who's been optimized, not your work. You. You've been optimized for higher token usage at Anthropic.

And also, on the "intelligence" / "consciousness" of AI... Just give this a read: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ai-is-bad-at-sudoku-its-even-worse-at-showing-its-work/ . For a second, just stop being such a big liar all in my face. And I'm not talking about anyone pushing a super-intelligent AI narrative on the media for profit. That's not the issue, that's only business. Jensen Huang is enabled to do all that big talk about AI and spread disrespect on software engineers because he's been allowed to. Just imagine for a second that Sam Altman came forward and said "Dear doctors, you'll be out of a job in 6 months, we have an AI that you can tell your symptoms to and it outputs a prescription with reasonable precision by X standards, so, maybe do better or become obsolete", and everybody just jumped on his d*** about it. They would be out on the street on day zero. Let me tell you the exact response: "All the scrawnies are welcome to take on the white coats, hit the hospitals and pharmacies, and have a great lot of fun with your new AI doctors!". Let the consequences speak.

Because that's what professionalism looks like. Understanding responsibility and accountability. One's own worth and the value of standards. But software? This is worse than getting beaten. Licking the master's boot -whom is not even the master-? Really? Is that how low this craft ranks? How on earth, do people who have gone through, at least, 3-4 years of an undergraduate program, have seen the vastness of the field, have seen kernel, have seen how easily bugs arise from seemingly nowhere, see claude code and are the first ones to panic and idolize this tool? (Thus enabling everybody else to laugh at us; "they dug their own grave")

I don't care how many iterations they can and how much smarter the next LLM models will be. I don't care if it's Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, I really do not care. You're not going to convince me now and you're not going to convince me in another hundred years either. And that's because your entire architecture, however fun to play with and somehow, after all, useful for certain use cases, is fundamentally wrong, if the goal is to think and reason. Good people, it's a probabilistic machine. It literally outputs the chain of words that sound best to follow after the given input. And on top of that, it's a statisical average over the entire available contents of the Internet and books? Alright but how do the parkgottens whittle so colorfully? "I'm sorry, I didn't understand." Whoever understood that, understood my point too.

I don't know how you remember 2007, but for me, I was 5 years old at that time, playing Flash games. But I still hold some nostalgia since the OS I was on (XP) came out in 2001, the games I played mostly were from 1999-2002 and I'm still in my GTA San Andreas and Counter Strike 1.6 era. I don't care how many more graphic details you can keep stacking on top. I don't care that you have detailed hair on your characters. I don't. I just don't care. What are you going to do about it? I still won't care. Take a look at this:

This dude (https://github.com/Velaron/cs16-client) reverse engineered (for free!) the CS 1.6 .exe so that now, thankfully, others (like me, from my ARM64), can recompile it and play this game that seemingly couldn't run faster than 30fps at the lowest settings, 30 years later, through Wine. I played like 2-3 online matches with my touchpad and haven't really gone back to it since but my point is: That is craftsmanship. That's art. That repo. Kudos to you, Bohdan Shulyar (https://github.com/Velaron). Claude wouldn't have had the inspiration, the knowledge, or the spirit to pull such an all-star move.

And it's not just the games. Try to remember the entire aesthetics of the internet in the 1997-2007 run, like prior to 2008, when we entered the death race to Minimalism. By the way, I just googled it, thought it sounded cool and wanted to check if anybody else said such a thing before, and guess what:

First result on Google. "Minimalism is the aesthetic language of gentrification". Exactly, my good man. Anyway, try to remember Linkin Park, early Youtube, The Calling, Hoobastank, Half Life 2, Drowning Pool, Windows Media Player skins, 3D-effect websites -three.js would've meant the world back in those years, but I digress-, 009 Sound System... Here, i'll refresh your memory: Everything felt so full of substance. Like the thing they do at Five Guys with the fries, so that you leave satisfied, feel that you're getting bang for your buck, because they stuff the bag full. It felt full in the way that, I remember, were this kind of colourful smoke bombs that you could learn how to make on youtube. By the way first time I listened to "Black Hole Sun" by Soundgarden was in a tutorial video for one of those back in 2009. So you had the ping-pong ball cut in pieces and wrapped in aluminum foil, easy-cheap smoke bombs, the only ones I could really make as a 6 year old kid, but then you had these potassium nitrate and sugar bombs, which really were the good stuff. The depth of that smoke, and the colorings you added while cooking that mix... -Do you remember how we used to build stuff at home?- That's what I would compare things back then to, they were full, gave deep, thick smoke, a lot of it, and colored. And you also got to listen to Soundgarden while doing it.

You could also draw a parallel to that line, with looks at paying once for software that came packaged into a physical device like a CD, instead of a monthly subscription with 30 updates a year, but I digress.

Remember uTorrent? That was magnificient. They killed the P2P dream, the uglies. We had the future in our hands and they stopped the fire by throwing cash at it. You know, if you throw enough cash at a nerd, they eventually un-nerd. I mean, not un-nerd, but find other more expensive pleasures which in turn they have to maintain with more cash so they become less fond of open source and the entire Internet world, or the physical one for that matter. They care as little about trees being cut down to make room for datacenters as they do about the internet moving from closed forums to the algorithm plaza, where we all have the same thoughts, are up to the same trends, and laugh at the same jokes. Internet used to be the place to weird out. Or find a new weird hobby. We used to be weirder, Internet or not. Edgy, even. And yet, we're less understanding of others than ever. The irony.

I think that's enough to explain my profound disapproval of minimalism and the quest for efficiency. It just feels like I don't care as much about my car burning too much fuel as I do about it lasting me a lifetime. I don't like switching, I don't like having to stay up to speed. Leave me alone, this is not what I was owed. Don't tell me I have to stay up to speed on all the trends. It's not like that. Trends used to last a decade, so everyone had more than enough time to catch up, and that if they even cared. I don't know where I read this but I'm sure it had at least something to do with Dieter Rams: the more efficient you try to make something, the less resilient it becomes.

I'm sorry, it was Nassim Nicholas Taleb: "Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines antifragility as systems that thrive on disorder, volatility, and stress, going beyond robustness (which merely resists stress) to improve from it. Fragile systems are harmed by shocks, whereas antifragile systems—like evolution or human muscles—gain from volatility. Antifragility requires more upside than downside from random events." This brings the AK-47 to mind. "The AK-47's reliability stems from its loose internal tolerances, which allow sand, dirt, and debris to be cleared without jamming".

So, in less abstract terms, to make something reliable, you need to give it a little "extra". A little extra dough, substance. A bit of fat. Or to leave a little "extra room", for error, or for more. I don't think I'm overstepping if I say that reliability always beats efficiency in the long run. Two words. Warren Buffett. One word. Jeans.

And on Dieter Rams: Less, but better. Off the top of my head, in CS, that is Linus Torvalds, Ken Thompson & Dennis Ritchie, George Hotz, Dijkstra, Jim Simons -yes, the algo trading mathematician-, Jay Freeman (saurik), and Alexey Pajitnov -the guy that invented Tetris-. That is the OG computer scientist profile.

Going back to AI assisted coding, and the impending doom of Skynet: If you believe such a thing, do better. Stop going to conferences and speaking of "software engineers" not saying "off to the next adventure" anymore after being done with their San Francisco startup jobs and, instead, just picking regular jobs like mailman or coffee shop worker. I'm going to explain this one because maybe you didn't see the video, but there was this guy on a conference on AI telling this story that I just told you but in a very ominous tone, like they've built something that will end the world, and they just retire so they can enjoy whatever we have left before we all die. What a *. Listen, if you had all the leverage you wanted -if you've been in a startup you know, CTO leaves, party's over-, and could do a job for two years, have +$10M in the bank at 25-30, not want to stay home, but also see the mockery and the defilement that's being made of this line of work, what would you do?

Make up your own mind.