Because you will have an understanding of the complete system. Your domain and the code. This means that you can be more creative with it and also get yourself out of a mess if it occurs (which it will).
From what I have seen AI doesn't understand the code. But even if you argue that it does understand the code it definitely doesn't understand the domain because it's only input channel is a stream of text and you didn't even type in a "full" text representation of the domain.
So you remain the only thing that can understand the whole system. If your competitor has no one (or no team) who can put together a full understanding of the system then you will have an advantage.
From my experience building different systems, there is no moat anymore ( beside your commercial connections for B2B). If one lack understanding of a domain, he will get it by testing the system.
So basically nothing has changed from before AI.
You will have a good understanding of a system which is 20 times smaller in size/features.
For a todo app that is fine. But for most projects your competitor will leave you in the dust with the speed at which they add features.
Same story, 25 years ago:
> But with Lisp our development cycle was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling us, we would have the new feature too.
What happens when the biggest feature that can be touted is concrete objective metrics about bugs/uptime/quality-stuff? Can't slop your way to having the "crafted with love and care, no bugs in production in the last 2 years" feature.
The 1900s saw doctors prescribing smoking, because it caused coughing. People will do some effed up things believing it is good for them, despite all evidence.
>Hicks led the race by 1.5 miles (2.4 km), but he had to be restrained from stopping and lying down by his trainers....He continued to battle onwards, hallucinating, and was barely able to walk for most of the course. When he reached the stadium, his support team carried him over the line, holding him in the air while he shuffled his feet as if still running.
"Let me share my slightly unusual definition of “effort”: it’s the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity requires, like tensing your brow when you try to understand something, or the excess tension in your hand when you hold your phone...Using this definition, it’s clear that the appropriate amount of effort for any activity is zero."
No. The original UNIX utilities were under proprietary licenses for an extremely long time, before eventually they broke free under BSD. The BSD tools are descendants of the originals and are also the versions used by macOS.
BSD wasn’t under an open license when GNU got started, so GNU reimplemented the proprietary UNIX utilities with their own enhancements and their own GPL license.
As such, complaining about the license is rich, considering GNU basically stole it themselves from the first round. And to this day, HN complaining about macOS’s utilities is also rich considering they are actually more standard and authentically UNIX than GNU.
Whens the last time you saw management tell you which compiler or toolchain you need to use to build your code ? But now we have CEOs and management dictating how coding should be done.
In the article the author admits: "I started coding again last year. But I hadn't written production code since 2012" and then goes on to say: "While established developers debate whether AI will replace them, these kids are shipping.".
Then I ask myself, what are they selling ? and lo and behold, it is AI/ML consulting.
Every praise of LLM is invariably preceded by some form of "I don't really understand their output but it looks great". That right there is the strongest signal I've caught so far that the whole thing is just a funny money pyramid.
In Sirens of Titan Vonnegut tells a story where governments decided to boost the space industry to drive aggregate demand.
This is exactly what is happening. When you realize that the whole thing is predicated on building and selling more $100,000 GPUs (and the solution to every problem therein is to use even more GPUs), everything really comes into focus.
Well, I don't really understand the detailed content of executables compiled by GCC/LLVM either, but I am not going to go back to writing assembly language. Having said that, I am old enough to remember worrying about compiler bugs, just like today I worry about LLM hallucinated vibe code. The hope is that we'll figure out how to make it more reliable---and I believe there seems to be a clear path forward.
"Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot, take thou what course thou wilt!"
But seriously, it isn't on me to justify my skepticism of the extreme claim, "We are in a race to build machine super-intelligence" because that skepticism is the rational default. Instead it's the burden of people who claim that we are in fact in that race, just like "self driving next year" was a claim for others to prove, just like "Crypto is the future of money" is a statement requiring a high degree of support.
We've seen this all before, and in the end the argument in favor seems to boil down to, "Look at how much money we're moving around with this hype" and "Trust us, the best is yet to come."
Just to clarify, I meant the rhetorical technique was being employed by the author of the article. He's downplaying the "AGI race" in order to normalize and validate the byproduct of the hype bubble to be as "normal and reliable as electricity and TCP/IP". It's clearly meant to attempt to disarm and appeal to skeptics, but there is more than enough dog whistling and performative contradiction in there to make it clear the true intention of the article -- praising Caesar.
For the record, I would be more inclined to be sympathetic towards the author if any receipts (i.e., repos) were produced at all, but as you so correctly stated, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I agree you do not have burden of defending the author's claims, apologies if that was not clear.
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