I think Warhol’s quote is nostalgic but incomplete.
I’m priced out of the best cars, best houses, best home theater systems, best schools. Even someone making $300k/year can’t afford all of the best of everything.
Sure, the iPhone has been “the best” possible phone which was also used by nearly everyone, but I think that’s an anomaly even in the short run.
Right now I’m paying $200/mo for Claude code to do an amount of work I would’ve had to pay $10,000/mo for. Of course I’m expecting those numbers to get closer to each other.
It’s a common tactic. Shock an industry with a new product and advertise it as being very affordable. Once you get a solid consumer base with enough organizations that have rebuilt their operations around it, slowly increase the cost and find more ways to produce revenue.
It all depends. Yes, something like that happened with Uber, but computers and consumer electronics have Moore's law working for them, so prices usually go down. (With occasional shortages like we see now with RAM - not for the first time, but it's usually temporary.)
My guess is that AI will be more like consumer electronics than like Uber.
I agree that consumer goods normally get cheaper over time. Software that becomes commercialized, or sees a surge in enterprise demand, tends to go the other way. Splunk, Elasticsearch, and Slack for example.
It has a real “where the wild things are” feel…which is the art used to decorate my local library.
A lot of people have chosen to take the Hobbit as seriously as its older brother—-including Peter Jackson—-and have missed out on the absurd, beautiful childishness of the whole thing.
The Hobbit does a wonderful job of introducing the ideas and characters of LotR in a way which is accessible for children and I think the art presented here is a valid artistic take on a children’s book about a dragon.
"absurd, beautiful childishness of the whole thing"
There is the bed-jumping scene, so there is childishness in the movies too. (I also hated that scene; I started to root for Sauron when I saw that scene.)
> I was under the impression that The Hobbit was the first book in this saga?
Yes: But the Hobbit is much shorter and is a much easier read. It also was edited after LOTR was published to fix some minor plot holes.
WRT the movies: Peter Jackson added a lot to the "Hobbit" trilogy that wasn't in the book, such as the whole story arc about Gandalf when he wasn't with the dwarves, or the other wizards. The book isn't the epic that the movie makes it out to be.
It’s as valid as any art. But as an illustrated book, it’s lacking.
If I had read this version as a kid, I’d be extremely confused as to why Gollum was 20 feet tall and wearing a flower crown. And then I’d be mad and consider it a bad illustration. (I’m aware some people think the original version didn’t specify his size. But the 1937 text states “Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature.”)
If there’s a character in a book who is known for wearing a red shirt, you might think it’s interesting to subvert expectations and give him a green shirt. But when the picture with the green shirt appears next to text describing a red shirt, it fails as an illustration. Especially in a book meant for children.
Tolkien and Jansson shared one thing: people did translations of their work which they totally hated
So it's sort-of funny that she wound up pissing him off with artwork which didn't fit his mental model, when they both experienced people trying to do the translation and failing to hit the mark.
(I think I read this of both of them, in respective biographies)
"I’m aware some people think the original version didn’t specify his size"
Well, he was a hobbit once, right? So a 10 meters tall Gollum makes less sense than a Gollum that has about the same size as other hobbits, give or take.
That's a retcon. There was no indication that he was a hobbit in The Hobbit (and as others have mentioned, in the original there was no physical description at all.)
This version says it’s the 1937 edition. It has the pre change story about Gollum offering the ring which Tolkien said is what he changed. But it also says he was a small slimy creature.
Yeah it's entirely possible the version that I have that is supposed to be from 1937 was tainted with later versions despite it not containing any of the more well known 1951 changes. That is maybe someone reconstructed it by taking a 1966 copy and undoing the changes, but forgot about the small slimy creature change.
But apparently there were dozens of different versions that actually ended up in print that had different amounts of the changes caused by some printers mixing old plates and new. So it's entirely possible that small slimy appeared in some versions around 1951 but not others and that's what that page is working off of.
(It's difficult to find an excellent authoritative link clearly explaining that the change was in the 1966 edition - there is 'The History of The Hobbit' by John D. Rateliff, but I can't find it online)
That’s not correct as far as I can tell. I found a 1937 version complete with the original “Gollum offers to give him the ring” and small slimy creature was there.
> (I’m aware some people think the original version didn’t specify his size. But the 1937 text states “Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature.”)
This directly contradicts the article. I found the first edition online, and have determined you are mistaken.
Also (referencing a side comment) the only mention of the size of Gollum's boat in that PDF (and it may not even be his boat - I'm not an expert on the source material, just going off mentions of "boat" near "Gollum") seems to be "little black boat" but that's pretty quickly followed by it fitting 4 people at a time which isn't all that "little", really, and I think the large Gollum in the illustration could fit in a 4 person boat (albeit in a perhaps top-heavy fashion.)
It’s not a primary source is a scan of a 2016 reprint that I can’t find much information on. And I she a version that purports to be the 1937 edition which does have the small slimy creature line.
The version you linked is a 2016 reprint, so I’m actually not sure which one is correct.
The version I linked to still has Gollum offering to give Bilbo the ring so it certainly predates the modern version I have. And that is the change Tolkien explicitly states he made.
The version I linked has this "If it asks us,
and we doesn't answer, we gives it a present, gollum!" Which I'm positive is only in the 1937 version. From what I can tell there were also minor corrections made before the 1951 changes, so I suppose it's possible that adding small slimy creature was one of those.
There are also reported to be dozens of different versions after 1951 caused by printers mixing and matching old and revised plates. I'm unsure exactly how that 1937 facsimile was recreated, or how the version I linked was created. One or both could have been taken from this mismatched versions.
I think the only way to be sure would be to buy a reprint from before 1951 or to find a scan of one online.
I see. This is a weird situation, then, and I apologize if I was abrasive.
Searching online ("Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum. I don't know") there are many hits for the line without "small and slimy creature." I assume it to be part of some legitimate edition, and I find it hard to believe this clarification would have been removed between editions, so with some confidence I conclude the original version did not have "small and slimy creature." Still, I understand your POV and appreciate your patience explaining it.
No worries. I wasn’t offended. Just surprised because I knew I had double checked.
Oh yeah I think it’s likely the very first version didn’t have it. But I’m much less sure about when it could have first popped up. I think it’s highly likely it showed up before the Swedish version. But I’m not very confident. Also it’s possible that the version Jansson was working from didn’t have it, even if a version of it with that text existed at the time.
The comment it's replying to stated that 1937 quote as if they had checked it. That deception seems ruder to me the language in the comment you're talking about. But I do agree the last sentence could've been omitted while getting the core point across (but we're all only human).
Agree that the post comes across as rude in tone, but it’s never explicitly disparaging. Might just be an overly direct tone (non-native English speaker, or maybe on the spectrum?)
Nah just sounds like people can't handle what they say being questioned as per usual. We should never take offense to being asked to clarify or explain when someone thinks we're wrong.
I'd only be vaguely offended if they had no grounded reason to think that I'm wrong (and they'd be calling me out for the sake of calling me out).
Communicating ideas is a part of tribalism too. Good brain chemicals when the tribe agrees and bad brain chemicals when they disagree.
> If there’s a character in a book who is known for wearing a red shirt, you might think it’s interesting to subvert expectations and give him a green shirt. But when the picture with the green shirt appears next to text describing a red shirt, it fails as an illustration. Especially in a book meant for children.
Having taught in schools for years? Treat companies that make addictive products the same way we treat drugs, alcohol and tobacco. Kids want them, particularly teenagers. We aren't perfect at stopping their access. But we can make a best attempt.
It would be hard, and it would be 'anti-capitalism', but, I think we have done real long term damage to a generation, and I think in 20 years, like Tobacco, it I'll turn out the companies knew how much they were damaging children and covered it up.
It's not anti-capitalism to not spend public money on nonsense that doesn't further the goals of education, no is it anti-capitalism to control the learning environment in schools. What we have is a collective action problem.
We are going to have to find new ways to correct for low-effort work.
I have a report that I made with AI on how customers leave our firm…The first pass looked great but was basically nonsense. After eight hours of iteration, the resulting report is better than I could’ve made on my own, by a lot. But it got there because I brought a lot of emotional energy to the AI party.
As workers, we need to develop instincts for “plausible but incomplete” and as managers we need to find filters that get rid of the low-effort crap.
The R2 was the first time I seriously thought about spending up on a vehicle.
It looks good.
But $45k++ is just wild to me. It seems like the market is undervaluing used EV’s, so hopefully the depreciation curve will bring these down to $30k in a couple years for us old-school folks who prefer not to have a $1000/mo car loan.
I'm a little confused why you think that's wild; It's pricing is inline with other BEV's in the Canadian market at least; it's comparing with the Model Y, the Equinox, the Blazer, the Mach e, the Ioniq 5, the EV6, the BZ4, and the Aryia.
Typically speaking you're going to spend $10,000 to $13,000 more then an equivalent gas car for a BEV vs a comparable gas car in Canada.
It’s just surprising to me that this is surprising to anyone in 2026. New cars are no longer $20-30k in the US and haven’t been since 2021. Average transaction price is now $50k+, so if companies like Rivian that skip the dealership model charge $45k, it really isn’t that expensive. The only new cars under $30k are sedans and hatchbacks. And most of them start at almost $27-30k for base price not including all the bs dealership fees.
> The only new cars under $30k are sedans and hatchbacks. And most of them start at almost $27-30k for base price not including all the bs dealership fees.
I’m not sure if you’re agreeing to what I said or if this is meant as a counterpoint. But that’s kind of proving my point, new cars are pretty expensive these days. If you’re getting a base Nissan Leaf for $30k, SUVs costing $45k don’t sound that unreasonable.
The 45k is a myth for now. The vehicles that have been reviewed so far are going to be $60k+ performance models. We'll see if they actually get down to 45k.
From the analysis I've seen with that drag coefficient, the 45k vehicle is going to have to have a range of 220 to 260 miles. Hardly something that will fly off the shelves.
Average price of a new vehicle in the US is $50,000. This is priced appropriately considering total cost of ownership delta against a combustion vehicle. Rivian needs more volume for prices to decline from manufacturing efficiency at scale.
A cursory search of the web shows that TCO for EVs in the US is higher than ICE for all but high mileage commuters. Wish it wasn't the case, but insurance alone is a 30% premium.
Insurance is a bear for Teslas. They cost a lot to repair.
The Model 3 Highland is super fun to drive. Maybe other EVs have this too. It's a very different experience to a similarly priced ICE car, and worth factoring in to the value proposition.
I specify Highland because the previous version was rattly and noisy enough to seriously detract from the zippy driving experience. Highland is nice.
NYT recently did a fantastic calculator. It isn't simple flat one or the other is cheaper. It takes into account buy vs lease, milage, local energy cost, length of ownership etc
> While drafting the fact sheet, we checked two headline policy ideas that the One Big, Beautiful, Bill introduced: the early sunset of the consumer EV credit and a new $250 annual EV fee. While the annual fee was dropped from the final legislation, the $7,500 consumer credit now ends September 30th.
> For the Equinox EV, these changes would cut its seven-year savings over the gasoline Equinox from about $9,000 to under $200. The Model Y also showed savings compared to its gasoline comparison under that less favorable scenario for EVs.
That link also factors in fuel savings which depends on where you live. I'd personally never save on an EV if it costs more upfront.
How are insurers making any money insuring these things nowadays? 30% higher premiums are being mentioned elsewhere in the comments; that doesn't sound like enough!
>How are insurers making any money insuring these things nowadays?
Because insurance is fundamentally a "skim some" model.
They have a massive pool of money. Sure the pool is bleeding all the time because they're paying out, but it's also being replenished by premiums paid in. They invest this "constant" pool of money and the return on this covers overhead plus profit.
So when we're all getting screwed on our premiums because fenders cost tens of thousands and Karens file claims for parking scratches they're making more money, because the same ROI on a bigger pool of money is a bigger number.
People keep repeating this uncritically. There is a car-debt crisis, and wages haven't kept up with house/car costs.
We have one person saying "well in Californian wages..." and another saying essentially that 50K isn't a lot of money when the average SALARY is $66K/year.
I also believe this $50,000 stat is the mean car price which is likely to be pushed up by luxury car sales that cost 2-4x what a typical car costs, whereas a median price would give a better indication of what most people are actually spending. I did a quick Google search and wasn't able to find any data on median price, though.
$50000 stat is the mean transaction price, which includes the dealership stuff that gets added on. While it’s true that it is an average, companies are increasingly not making cheaper models. Sub $30k new cars are almost a myth at this point. You get sedans and hatchback models that start in the high 20s as the base price but we all know you’re not walking out of that dealership with a base model or just paying the advertised rate. SUVs on the other hand, which most people prefer these days are closer to $40k.
To what degree is this caused by car prices versus Americans' compulsion to keep buying new cars? Anecdotally, the folks I know struggling with car payments are almost exclusively in the latter bucket. But I'm open to having my mind changed with data.
Not entirely true; there are at least the lease, rental, and commercial fleet markets supplying predictable inventory of used cars to the public market.
I have 2014 Tesla S which which I recently had drive unit and battery replaced ($20k total). my friends all think I am nuts, but they all have $1k+ payments (some for 72m) while I haven’t had a car payment since 2017 and won’t have another one till 2036 :)
If your friends dumped $20K into paying off those loans they’d be a lot closer to paid off or maybe paid off completely, though. And that’s on a newer, lower mileage car.
I’m all for maintaining vehicles and keeping them on the road, but I don’t think you’re in a place to criticize your friends with $1K car payments after putting almost 2 years worth of those payments into a car that’s over a decade old.
I have spent exactly $0.00 on maintenance since 2014 when I bought the car (other than tires, 5G modem and internal battery). not sure what “paying for the car” means, it was paid off in 2017.
to simplify the math:
1. I spent total $90k
2. to have a car from 2014 through 2035-ish
for a $1k/month that would be $252k for my friends :)
nothing till 2035 and even then I might just replace the battery again. people look at EVs as like some disposable thing, when battery deteriorates you chuck it (shows in the pricing of 'used' EVs, my friend bought a 3-year old eTron that was originally purchased for $93k for $35k - 19k miles on it). my tesla is rock n roll now and will be good for the next decade
I wonder how much of this ridiculous car money was previously buy-a-house money. If you don't think you'll ever buy a house, you might as well spend it on a car.
Small, efficient gasoline vehicles are prohibited by CAFE standards in the US, but EVs are exempt. Generally new EV manufacturers have been starting with high-end vehicles, and working their way into mid-range, with hopes on eventual low-range vehicles.
Because EVs are exempt from CAFE standards, it does open up a niche at the very low end, and Slate and Telo are starting up production in that market, so one of their vehicles might appeal to you.
ya same, i can't see spending as much as i did on my first tesla 5+ years ago, the depreciations just too steep, hopefully that holds for rivian too and i'll pick one up in a couple years the R2 is really nice.
That said, china BEV's are 1/2 the cost even accounting for import costs to the USA lol so sort of points toward a issue with US companies at the moment
Most people in California don’t have PG&E. Most of the land area in the northern 2/3 of the State or so is covered by PG&E, but people and land area aren't the same thing. Southern California Edison alone serves almost as many people as PG&E, and other smaller utilities, including public utilities like LADWP, SMUD, Silicon Valley Power, etc., serve another big chunk of the population.
SCE will screw you nearly as hard. We are on a tiered usage which is the cheapest they offer and it's $0.32/kWh and even at that rate the EV isn't much cheaper than the non-hybrid I replaced. I'd need to switch to a ToU plan which would increase my other electricity costs.
Also for depreciation:
2020 Mazda 3 - sold $18k at dealer, originally $28k, 64% retained
2022 Kia EV6 - bought $25k, originally $55k-$7.5k federal, 53% retained
For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things.
When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic.
When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort.
When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences.
Then I learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software.
Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful.
It was, for me, never about the code. It was always about making something useful for myself and others. And that has never been easier.
I like coding, I really do. But like you, I like building things more than I like the way I build them. I do not find myself miss writing code by hand as much.
I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build things right".
But I do worry. The main question is this - will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human (assuming AI will get faster to the "build things right" phase, which is not there yet)
My main hope is this - AI can beat a human in chess for a while now, we still play chess, people earn money from playing chess, teaching chess, chess players are still celebrated, youtube influencers still get monetized for analyzing games of celebrity chess players, even though the top human chess player will likely lose to a stockfish engine running on my iPhone. So maybe there is hope.
> will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human (assuming AI will get faster to the "build things right" phase, which is not there yet)
Of course, and if LLMs keep improving at current rates it will happen much faster than people think.
Arguably you don't need junior software engineers anymore. When you also don't need senior software engineers anymore it isn't that much of a jump to not needing project managers, managers in general or even software companies at all anymore.
Most people, in order to protect their own ego, will assume *their* job is safe until the job one rung down from them disappears and then the justified worrying will begin.
People on the "right things to build" track love to point out how bad people are at describing requirements, so assume their job as a subject matter expert and/or customer-facing liaison will be safe, but does it matter how bad people are at describing requirements if iteration is lightning fast with the human element removed?
Yes, maybe someone who needs software and who isn't historically some sort of software designer is going to have to prompt the LLM 250 times to reach what they really want, but that'll eventually still be faster than involving any humans in a single meeting or phone call. And a lot of people just won't really need software as we currently think about it at all, they'll just be passing one-off tasks to the AI.
The real question is what happens when the labor market for non-physical work completely implodes as AI eats it all. Based on current trends I'm going to predict in terms of economics and politics we handle it as poorly as possible leading to violent revolution and possible societal collapse, but I'd love to be wrong.
> The real question is what happens when the labor market for non-physical work completely implodes as AI eats it all. Based on current trends I'm going to predict in terms of economics and politics we handle it as poorly as possible leading to violent revolution and possible societal collapse, but I'd love to be wrong.
Exactly and the world has to start talking about it. Eventually everybody will, including all sorts of politicians who advocate to 'finally tackle the problem', which will be too late.
> I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build things right".
I've always been strongly in the first category, but... the issue is that 10x more people will be able to build the right things. And if I build the right thing, it will be easy to copy. The market will get crowded, so distribution will become even harder than it is today. Success will be determined by personal brand, social media presence, social connections.
For me, photography is the metaphor - https://raskie.com/post/we-have-ai-at-home - We've had the technology to produce a perfect 2D likeness of a subject for close to two centuries now, and people are still painting.
Video didn't kill the radio star either. In fact the radio star has become more popular than ever in this, the era of the podcast.
While what you're saying is true, I think it is important to recognize that painting in a way that generates a livable income is mostly a marketing gig.
Likewise, being a podcaster, or "influencer" in general, is all about charisma and marketing.
So with value destruction for knowledge workers (and perhaps physical workers too once you factor in robotics) we may in fact be moving into a real "attention economy" where all value is related to being a charismatic marketer, which will be good for some people for a while, terrible for the majority, but even for the winners it seems like a limited reprieve. Historically speaking charismatic marketers can only really exist through the patronage of people who mostly aren't themselves charismatic marketers. Without patrons (who have disposable income to share) the charismatic marketers are eventually just as fucked as everyone else.
Art, photography, acting, music - none of them are good career choices. You'll either be one of the fortunate few, or you'll struggle to make a living. Sucks but that's how it is.
> will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human
I share this sentiment. It's really cool that these systems can do 80% of the work. But given what this 80% entails, I don't see a moat around that remaining 20%.
I can't explain it in a way that will make sense or base it on any data, but I do see that moat all the time. For example, Microsoft / GitHub somehow taking a 3 year lead (with Co-Pilot) and losing it to Cursor in months, and still catching up.
Microsoft / GitHub have no real limitation to doing better/faster, maybe it's the big company mentality, moving slower, fear of taking risks where you have a lot to lose, or when the personal incentive for a product manager at github is much much lower than the one of a co-founder of a seed stage startup. Co-Pilot was a microscopic line item for Microsoft as a whole, and probably marginal for GitHub too. But for Cursor, this was everything.
This is why we have innovation, if mega-corps didn't promote people to their level of incompetence, if bureaucracy and politics didn't ruin every good thing, if private equity didn't bleed every beloved product to the last penny, we would have no chance for any innovation or entrepreneurship because these company have practically close to unlimited resources.
So my only conclusion from this is - the moat is sometimes just the will to do better, to dare to say, I don't care if someone has a billion dollars to compete with me, I'll still do better.
In other words, don't underestimate the power of big companies to make colossal mistakes and build crappy products. My only worry is, that AI would not make the same mistakes an we'll basically have a handful of companies in the world (the makers of models, owner of tokens e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, Meta, xAi), if AI led product teams will be able to not make the mistakes of modern corporations of ruining everything good that they got in their hands, then maybe software related entrepreneurship will be dead.
> "build the right things" [vs] "build things right"
I think this (frequent) comparison is incorrect. There are times when quality doesn't matter and times that it does. Without that context these discussions are meaningless.
If I build my own table no one really gives a shit about the quality besides me and maybe my friends judging me.
But if I sell it, well then people certainly care[0] and they have every right to.
If I build my own deck at my house people do also care and there's a reason I need to get permits for this, because the danger it can cause to others. It's not a crazy thing to get your deck inspected and that's really all there is to it.
So I don't get these conversations because people are just talking past one another. Look, no one gives a fuck if you poorly vibe code your personal website, or at least it is gonna be the same level as building your own table. But if Ikea starts shipping tables with missing legs (even if it is just 1%) then I sure give a fuck and all the customers have a right to be upset.
I really think a major part of this concern with vibe coding is about something bigger. It is about slop in general. In the software industry we've been getting sloppier and sloppier and LLMs significantly amplify that. It really doesn't matter if you can vibe code something with no mistakes, what matters is what the businesses do. Let's be honest, they're rushing and don't care about quality because they have markets cornered and consumers are unable to accurately evaluate products prior to purchase. That's the textbook conditions for a lemon market. I mean the companies outsource tech support so you call and someone picks up who's accent makes you suspicious of their real name being "Steve". After all, it is the fourth "Steve" you've talked to as you get passed around from support person to support person. The same companies who contract out coders from poor countries and where you find random comments in another language. That's the way things have been going. More vaporware. More half baked products.
So yeah, when you have no cake the half baked cake is probably better than nothing. At home it also doesn't matter if you're eating a half baked cake or one that competes with the best bakers in the world. But for everyday people who can't bake their own cakes, what do they do? All they see is a box with a cake in it, one is $1, another for $10, and another other is $100. They look the same but they can't know until they take a bite. You try enough of the $1 cakes and by the time you give up the $10 cakes are all gone. By the time you get so frustrated you'll buy the $100 cake they're gone too.
I don't dislike vibe coding because it is "building things the wrong way" or any of that pretentious notion. I, and I believe most people with a similar opinion, care because "the right things" aren't being built. Most people don't care how things were built, but they sure do care about the result. Really people only start caring about how the sausage is made when they find out that something distasteful is being served and concealed from them. It's why everyone is saying "slop".
So when people make this false dichotomy it just feels like people aren't listing to what's actually being said.
[0] Mind you, it is much easier for an inexperienced person to judge the quality of a table than software. You don't need to be a carpenter to know a table's leg is missing or that it is wobbly but that doesn't always hold true for more sophisticated things like software or even cars. If you haven't guessed already, I'm referencing lemon markets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Of course. I mean, my view is that it needs to be "build the right things right", vs "build things right and then discover if they are the right things". It's a stab at premature optimisation, focusing on code elegance more than delivering working software. Code simplicity, good design, scalability, are super important for maintainability, even in the age of AI (maybe even more so).
But considering that AI will more and more "build things right" by default, it's up to us humans to decide what are the "right things to build".
Once AI knows what are the "right things to build" better than humans, this is AGI in my book, and also the end of classical capitalism as we know it. Yes, there will still be room for "human generated" market, like we have today (photography didn't kill painting, but it made it a much less of a main employment option)
In a way, AI is the great equality maker, in the past the strongest men prevailed, then when muscles were not the main means to assert force, it was the intellect, now it's just sheer want. You want to do something, now you can, you have no excuses, you just need to believe it's possible, and do it.
As someone else said, agency is eating the world. For now.
> it needs to be "build the right things right", vs "build things right and then discover if they are the right things"
I still think this is a bad comparison and I hoped my prior comment would handle this. Frankly, you're always going to end up in the second situation[0] simply because of 2 hard truths. 1) you're not omniscient and 2) even if you were, the environment isn't static.
> But considering that AI will more and more "build things right" by default
And this is something I don't believe. I say a lot more here[1] but you can skip my entire comment and just read what Dijkstra has to say himself. I dislike that we often pigeonhole this LLM coding conversation into one about a deterministic vs probabilistic language. Really the reason I'm not in favor of LLMs is because I'm not in favor of natural language programming[2]. The reason I'm not in favor of natural language programming has nothing to do with its probabilistic nature and everything to do with its lack of precision[3].
I'm with Dijkstra because, like him, I believe we invented symbolic formalism for a reason. Like him, I believe that abstraction is incredibly useful and powerful, but it is about the right abstraction for the job.
[2] At the end of the day, that's what they are. Even if they produce code you're still treating it as a transpiler: turning natural language into code.
[3] Okay, technically it does but that's because probability has to do with this[4] and I'm trying to communicate better and most people aren't going to connect the dots (pun intended) between function mapping and probabilities. The lack of precision is inherently representable through the language of probability but most people aren't familiar with terms like "image" and "pre-image" nor "push-forward" and "pull-back". The pedantic nature of this note is precisely illustrative of my point.
> The reason I'm not in favor of natural language programming has nothing to do with its probabilistic nature and everything to do with its lack of precision
Yeah, even if they're made to be 100% deterministic, you've now got a programming language whose rules are deterministic, but hard to understand. You've effectively pinned the meaning of the natural language in some way, but not a way that anyone can effectively learn, and one that doesn't necessarily match their understanding of the actual natural language.
And it's weird that this even needs to be argued given that our long explanations are needed to even convey fairly simple concepts. Not to mention that it still relies upon correct interpretation.
The result of natural language programming is either an extremely limited programming language or an extremely verbose one (again, look at law). Presumably it'll result in both.
It's a nice idea but ignores the reason we invented symbolic languages in the first place. They were invented after natural language. It's not like code is some vestigial language raiment. We're trying to replace it because it's hard and annoying. But I'm certain that's mainly due to the level of abstraction we're trying to work with more than due to the language we're using
In my opinion the relationship between level of detailed care and resulting beauty is proportional. Can you get the same level without getting your hands dirty? Sure, maybe, but I doubt a painter or novelist could really produce beautiful work without being intimately familiar with that work. The distance that heavy use of AI tools creates between you and the output does not really lend itself to beauty. Could you do it, sure, but at that point it's probably more efficient to just do things yourself and have complete intimate control.
To me, you sound more utilitarian. The philosophy you are presenting is a kind of Ikea philosophy. Utility, mass production, and unique beauty are generally properties that do not cohere together, and there's a reason for this. I think the use of LLMs in the production of digital goods is very close to the use of automation lines in the production of physical goods. No matter how you try some of the human charm, and thus beauty will inevitably be lost, the number of goods will increase, but they'll all be barely differentiable souless replications of more or less the same shallow ideas repeated as infinitum.
I agree, LLMs definitely sand off a lot of personality, and you can see it in writing the most, at this point I'm sure tons of people are subconsciously trained to lower the trust for something where they recognize typical patterns.
With the code, especially interfaces, the results will be similar -- more standardized palettes, predictable things.
To be fair, the converging factor is going on pretty much forever, e.g. radio/TV led to the lots of local accents disappearing, our world is heavily globalized.
I've seen a hundred ai-generated things, and they are rarely interesting.
Not because the tools are insufficient, it's just that the kind of person that can't even stomach the charmed life of being a programmer will rarely be able to stomach the dull and hard work of actually being creative.
Why should someone be interested in you creations? In what part of your new frictionless life would you've picked up something that sets you apart from a million other vibe-coders?
> stomach the dull and hard work of actually being creative
This strikes me as the opposite of what I experience when I say I'm "feeling creative", then everything comes easy. At least in the context of programming, making music, doing 3D animation and some other topics. If it's "dull and hard work" it's because I'm not feeling "creative" at all, when "creative mode" is on in my brain, there is nothing that feels neither dull nor hard. Maybe it works differently for others.
I love building things too, but for me, the journey is a big part of what brings me joy. Herding an LLM doesn't give me joy like writing code does. And the finished project doesn't feel the same when my involvement is limited to prompting an LLM and reviewing its output.
If I had an LLM generate a piece of artwork for me, I wouldn't call myself an artist, no matter how many hours I spent conversing with the LLM in order to refine the image. So I wouldn't call myself a coder if my process was to get an LLM to write most/all the code for me. Not saying the output of either doesn't have value, but I am absolutely fine gatekeeping in this way: you are not an artist/coder if this is how you build your product. You're an artistic director, a technical product manager, something of that nature.
That said, I never derived joy from every single second of coding; there were and are plenty of parts to it that I find tedious or frustrating. I do appreciate being able to let an LLM loose on some of those parts.
But sparing use is starting to really only work for hobby projects. I'm not sure I could get away with taking the time to write most of it manually when LLMs might make coworkers more "productive". Even if I can convince myself my code is still "better" than theirs, that's not what companies value.
Isn't this like saying that if better woodworking tools come out, and you like woodworking, that woodworking somehow 'isn't your craft'. They said that their craft is about making things.
There are woodworkers on YouTube who use CNC, some who use the best Festool stuff but nothing that moves on its own, and some who only use handtools. Where is the line at which woodworking is not their craft?
The better analogy is you're now a shop manager or even just QA. You don't need to touch, look at, or think about the production process past asking for something and seeing if the final result fits the bill.
You get something that looks like a cabinet because you asked for a cabinet. I don't consider that "woodworking craft", power tools or otherwise.
I'm pretty sure at least the better woodworking shop managers and QA people all have experience with woodworking and probably would also consider this their craft if asked.
If it looks like a cabinet, works as a cabinet and doesn’t fall apart, by all intents and purposes it’s a cabinet. 99% of people out there won’t care if it was a “craftsman” or a robot built it. Just like most people buy furniture at Ikea.
The difference is that the person who was a woodworker is no longer needed. Why can’t the customer just walk up to a kiosk and ask the machine to start building? The machine or another one specialized for QA can then assess if it fits all the technical requirements which the customer doesn’t necessarily understand. This is what most people here are worried about, eventually the professional human being will no longer be needed by businesses which can produce everything with neither customer nor business owner being in need of specialized knowledge which they previously needed to acquire by hiring professionals.
The analogy you're making is that wiring a taskrabbit to assemble Ikea furniture is woodworking.
There's a market for Ikea. It's put woodworkers out of business, effectively. The only woodworkers that make reasonable wages from their craft are influencers. Their money comes from YouTube ads.
There's no shame in just wanting things without going to the effort of making them.
Love this extension of the analogy, particularly. Especially because, like a woodworker inspecting IKEA assembled by a taskrabbit, the craftsmanship of a finished product becomes less and less impressive the longer you inspect it
I think a better comparison is painting and photography. Prior to the invention of photography, painting portraits of individuals and families was a real profession. Today it’s practically unheard of outside of heads of state and the like. Sure, there are plenty of people who could afford to commission a painted portrait but few do when a quick session in a photographer’s studio is so much cheaper and more convenient.
Woodworking is, like, the quintessential craft. I think it is very useful to bring it in when discussion "craft"!
I am not myself a woodworker, however I have understood that part of what makes it "crafty" is that the woodworker reads grain, adjusts cuts, and accepts that each board is different.
We can try to contrast that to whatever Ikea does with wood and mass production of furniture. I would bet that variation in materials is "noise" that the mass production process is made to "reject" (be insensitive to / be robust to).
But could we imagine an automated woodworking system that takes into account material variation, like wood grain, not in an aggregate sense (like I'm painting Ikea to do), but in an individual sense? That system would be making judgements that are woodworker-like.
The craft lives on. The system is informed by the judgement of the woodworker, and the craftperson enters an apprenticeship role for the automation... perhaps...
Until you can do RL on the outcome of the furniture. But you still need craft in designing the reward function.
Yeah, seems like too many went into this field for money or status not because they like the process. Which is not an issue by itself, but now these people talk about how their AI assistant of choice made them some custom tool in two hours that would have taken them three weeks. And it's getting exhausting.
That is an insane assumption to make based on the grandparents' post. What part of them talking about how much they care about the systems thinking and software architecture and usefulness and meaningfulness to other people of software over the day-to-day drudgery of APIs and bugs and typing in syntax indicates to you that they only care about money and status? They just care about a different part of the process.
I went into this field because I love programming. I didn't even know how well these jobs paid until my junior year of college when I got an internship at AWS. I constantly programmed and read programming texts in my spare time growing up, in college, and after work.
I love AI tools. I can have AI do the boring parts. I can even have to write polished, usable apps in languages that I don't know.
I miss being able to think so much about architecture, best practices, frameworks/languages, how to improve, etc.
It is a different kind of code. Just a lot of programmers can’t grock it as such.
I guess I started out as a programmer, then went to grad school and learned how to write and communicate my ideas, it has a lot in common with programming, but at a deeper level. Now I’m doing both with AI and it’s a lot of fun. It is just programming at a higher level.
I’m going to be thinking about this comment for a while—-and I think you’re basically right.
Almost none of the code I wrote in 2015 is still in use today. Probably some percentage of people can point to code that lasted 20 years or longer, but it can’t be a big percentage. When I think of the work of a craft, I think of doing work which is capable of standing up for a long time. A great builder can make a house that can last for a thousand years and a potter can make a bowl that lasts just as long.
I’ve thought of myself as a craftsman of code for a long time but maybe that was just wrong.
A big component to coding is typing. If you aren't doing the typing, then, unless you are dictating code to someone else to mechanically, verbatim type out for you, you are not coding.
I do believe directing an LLM to write code, and then reviewing and refining that code with the LLM, is a skill that has value -- a ton of value! -- but I do not think it is coding.
It's more like super-technical product management, or like a tech lead pair programming with a junior, but in a sort of mentorship way where they direct and nudge the junior and stay as hands-off as possible.
It's not coding, and once that's the sum total of what you do, you are no longer a coder.
You can get defensive and call this gatekeeping, but I think it's just the new reality. There's no shame in admitting that you've moved to a stage of your life where you build software but your role in it isn't as a coder anymore. Just as there's no shame in moving into management, if that's what you enjoy and are effective at it.
(If presenting credentials is important to you, as you've done, I've been doing this since 1989, when I was 8 years old. I've gone down to embedded devices, up through desktop software, up to large distributed systems. Coding is my passion, and has been for most of my life.)
As someone who started with Borland DOS-era IDEs I can tell you that IDEs did get a lot better over the years. I'm still fascinated every day by JetBrains IDEs.
so much garbage ego in statements like this. if you really knew about software, you'd recognize there are about a million ways to be successful in this field
> Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful.
For how long do you think this is sustainable? In the sense of you, or me, or all these other people here being able to earn a living. Six months? A couple of years? The time until the next-but-one Claude release drops?
Does everyone have to just keep re-making themselves for whatever the next new paradigm turns out to be? How many times can a person do that? How many times can you do that?
I want to be in your camp, and am trying hard. But the OP's blog entry should at least give us a moment to "respect the dead". That's all he's asking, I think.
I don't think 5 years is necessary. I think after two years of this agentic orchestration if you rarely touch code yourself skill will degrade to the point they won't be able to write anything non-trivial without assistance.
Depends how long you've done it, and how much the landscape has changed since then. I can still hop back into SQL and it all comes back to me though I haven't done it regularly at all for nearly 10 years.
In the web front-end world I'd be pretty much a newbie. I don't know any of the modern frameworks, everything I've used is legacy and obsolete today. I'd ramp up quicker than a new junior because I understand all the concepts of HTTP and how the web works, but I don't know any of the modern tooling.
It won't be 5 years, it'll be less than a year. When you don't exercise, your muscles atrophy. It's the same for any other skill. I use to speak conversational french in college, fast forward 10 years later and my understanding is no different than a casual "Emily in Paris" fan.
It'll be the same here, the only question is if those that do exercise will be able to command better salaries. I think this is possible but not with the current political climate.
If AI can do the coding, those of us who aren't programmers don't need you anymore. We can just tell the AI what we want.
Luckily for real programmers, AI's not actually very good at generating quality code. It generates the equivalent of Ali Baba code: it lasts for one week and then breaks.
This is going to be the future of programming: low-paid AI clerks to generate the initial software, and then the highly paid programmers who fix all the broken parts.
Yes. The problem is there is a huge invisible gap between "looks like it works" and "actually works", and everything that entails, like security and scaling beyond a couple users. Non-programmers and inexperienced ones will have trouble with those gaps. Welcome to our slop filled future.
It's been here since it's inception. The more the market grew and the more computing became widespread, the greater the number of ravenous sociopaths with other people's money got involved. This is just another version of Rome burning. This is the terminal acceleration phase. The lunatics are running everything to the ground and the few sane people left are labeled the same way they always had been. The useful idiots are just thinking they're so much smarter. Noone asked if it is wise or not, they are thinking they can outrun the treadmill. Just add water and LLM, it's so much fun for the whole family.
Adam Neely has a video on GenAI and it's impact on the music industry. There is a section in the video about beauty and taste and it's pretty different from your conclusions. One example I remember is would an AI find beauty in a record scratch sound?
This is the best description of value from AI that I've seen so far. It allows people who don't like writing code to build things without doing so.
I don't think it's nearly as valuable to people who do enjoy writing code, because I don't think prompting an agent (at least in their current state) is actually more productive than just writing the code. So I don't see any reason to mourn on either side.
> For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things.
Me too, but... The ability to code was a filter. With AI, the pool of people who can build beautiful elegant software products expands significantly. Good for the society, bad for me.
AI agents seem to be a powerful shortcut to the drudgery. But let's not forget, that powerful software rests on substance. My hope is the substance will increase, after all.
So when you "learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software", it wasn't about code? I don't get it. Yes, building useful things is the ultimate goal, but code is the medium through which you do it, and I don't understand how that cannot be an important part of the process.
It's like a woodworker saying, "Even though I built all those tables using precise craft and practice, it was NEVER ABOUT THE CRAFT OR PRACTICE! It was about building useful things." Or a surgeon talking about saving lives and doing brain surgery, but "it was never about learning surgery, it was about making people get better!"
Not the GP I feel some of that energy. The parts I most enjoy are the interfaces, the abstractions, the state machines, the definitions. The code I enjoy too, and I would be sad to lose all contact with it, but I've really appreciated AI especially for helping me get over the initial hump on things like:
- infrastructure bs, like scaffold me a JS GitHub action that does x and y.
- porting, like take these kernel patches and adjust them from 6.14 to 6.17.
- tools stuff, like here's a workplace shell script that fetches a bunch of tokens for different services, rewrite this from bash to Python.
- fiddly things like dealing with systemd or kubernetes or ansible
- fault analysis, like here's a massive syslog dump or build failure, what's the "real" issue here?
In all these cases I'm very capable of assessing, tweaking, and owning the end result, but having the bot help me with a first draft saves a bunch of drudgery on the front end, which can be especially valuable for the ADHD types where that kind of thing can be a real barrier to getting off the ground.
But this just makes me feel like it's literally more ABOUT the code than less. The comment I replied to makes it seem like "code" and "solving humanity's problems" are two different things, when in reality, one leads to the other (if we assume you're working on good products, etc.).
It's one thing to have your approach where you're using AI to help w/ the code, but it's totally another to pretend like "code" is not something you were ever interested in, so it's okay for the AI to write it while you're busy "solving problems," which doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Because such people are not sincere either to themselves about who they are or to others. It's really hard for me to take seriously phrases like "I joined this industry to make things, not to write code".
Do painters paint because they just like to see the final picture? Or do they like the process? Yes, painting is an artistic process, not exactly crafting one. But the point stand.
Woodworkers making nice custom furniture generally enjoy the process.
It's like learning to cook and regularly making your own meals, then shifting to a "new paradigm" of hiring a personal chef to cook for you. Food's getting made either way, but it's not really the same deal.
No, it's more like moving from line cook, to head chef in charge of 30 cooks.
Food's getting made, but you focus on the truly creative part -- the menu, the concept, the customer experience. You're not boiling pasta or cutting chives for the thousandth time. The same way now you're focusing on architecture and design now instead of writing your 10,000th list comprehension.
Except the cooks don't exist anymore as they all have become head chefs (or changed careers) and the food is being cooked by magical cooking black boxes
Would you consider drudgery the in-depth thinking that's required to actually go and write that algorithm, think out all the data ownership relationships, name the variables, think the edge cases for the tests?
For me, the act of sitting down and writing the code is what actually leads to true understanding of the logic, in a similar way to how the only way to understand a mathematical proof is to go trough it. Sure, I'm not doing anything useful by showing that the root of 2 is irrational, but by doing that I gain insights that are otherwise impossible to transfer between two minds.
I believe that coding was one of the few things (among, for example, writing math proofs, or that weird process of crafting something with your hands where the object you are building becomes intimately evident) that get our brains to a higher level of abstraction than normal mammal "survival" thinking. And it makes me very sad to see it thrown out of the window in the name of a productivity that may not even be real.
> Would you consider drudgery the in-depth thinking that's required to actually go and write that algorithm, think out all the data ownership relationships, name the variables, think the edge cases for the tests?
For 99% of the functions I've written in my life? Absolutely drudgery. They're barely algorithms. Just bog-standard data transformation. This is what I love having AI replace.
For the other 1% that actually requires original thought, truly clever optimization, and smart naming to make it literate? Yes, I'll still be doing that by hand, although I'll probably be getting the LLM to help scaffold all the unit tests and check for any subtle bugs or edge cases I may have missed.
The point is, LLMs let me spend more time at the higher level of abstraction that is more productive. It's not taking it away!
I do agree with this, and in fact I do often use LLMs for for these tasks! I guess my message is more intended towards vibe-only coders (and, I guess, the non-technical higher ups drooling at the idea of never having to hire another developer).
I see junior PM types glowing about being able to lead teams of agents, doing their bidding without putting up a fuss or argument. Short term, developers are in for a world of hurt. Long term, we're going to need a lot more to clean this crap up.
Noone will clean it up, it's a societal problem. The koolaid is produce more, like we need another app for X . We are celebrating owning nothing, as a liberating act. People hate mental load yes, this is the perfect drug. You don't need to think or challenge anything. If the model says it's okay, it's okay. Local models will never be able to democratise this. People will do as they are told, and another generation of consumers will follow. The matrix won't be a prison, it will be a prompt from birth to death. And y'all clapping cause you can have X number of agents running around burning tokens like kids looking at the fire cracker on their hand about to blow up, giggling. The world was always mad, and this is proof it will always be mad while people are still around.
I think there is room for a hybrid approach. You can delegate most of the "drudgery" to AI, but keep the parts that require creative solutions for yourself. There is undoubtedly a lot of crappy work we have to do as engineers. This is stuff that needs to be done but has also been done many times before.
I think unless you're vibe coding, it's pretty clear that they're still making it. Just because you aren't literally typing 100% of the characters that make up the syntax of the programming language you're using doesn't mean you're not making the final product in most meaningful sentences if you're designing the architecture, the algorithms, the data structures, the state machines, the interfaces, etc, and thinking about how they interact and whether they'll do something that's useful for the people you're making it for.
So many people responding to you with snarky comments or questioning your programming ability. It makes me sad. You shared a personal take (in response to TFA which was also a personal take). There is so much hostility and pessimism directed at engineers who simply say that AI makes them more productive and allows them to accomplish their goals faster.
To the skeptics: by all means, don't use AI if you don't want to; it's your choice, your career, your life. But I am not sure that hitching your identity to hating AI is altogether a good idea. It will make you increasingly bitter as these tools improve further and our industry and the wider world slowly shifts to incorporate them.
Frankly, I consider the mourning of The Craft of Software to be just a little myopic. If there are things to worry about with AI they are bigger things, like widespread shifts in the labor force and economic disruption 10 or 20 years from now, or even the consequences of the current investment bubble popping. And there are bigger potential gains in view as well. I want AI to help us advance the frontiers of science and help us get to cures for more diseases and ameliorate human suffering. If a particular way of working in a particular late-20th and early-21st century profession that I happen to be in goes away but we get to those things, so be it. I enjoy coding. I still do it without AI sometimes. It's a pleasant activity to be good at. But I don't kid myself that my feelings about it are all that important in the grand scheme of things.
Honest question…given how developed our sensibilities are around docs, file storage, and spreadsheets, what is the hard part to this?
Don’t get me wrong…something is hard…I still use Microsoft Word because I feel like I have to. But what is keeping the industry from building a word processor that doesn’t suck and is capable of interfacing with .docx files?
Word has a billion features you did not know that exist. Getting something Word shaped is probably straight-forward enough (how long did it take to make Google Docs), but getting those dangling features and quirks would be a long haul.
Mimicking Excel - woof. This one is used by so many people in different ways, that unless you offer 1:1 bug compatibility, it would be challenging to get 100% of people to meet everyone's current use case.
I’m priced out of the best cars, best houses, best home theater systems, best schools. Even someone making $300k/year can’t afford all of the best of everything.
Sure, the iPhone has been “the best” possible phone which was also used by nearly everyone, but I think that’s an anomaly even in the short run.
Right now I’m paying $200/mo for Claude code to do an amount of work I would’ve had to pay $10,000/mo for. Of course I’m expecting those numbers to get closer to each other.
No VC-funded gravy train lasts forever.
reply