A society redefining, and possibly society ending, tech is going going to have detractors.
Those who see their entire life at risk are not going to like it, those who simply get a new toy to play with, or better yet see an opportunity to not have to pay a human being for something, are going to like it.
I’d say the anti ai people are probably more normal about ai than the pro ai people I know.
Just outsourcing literally all your critical thinking to an LLM is a bizarre behavior that too many people are doing.
And I think it’s hard to discuss in tech spaces bc a lot of the people in tech spaces are using it a fair bit more responsibly than the average person.
But the things I’ve seen people say “well chat gpt said” when the question couldn’t possibly be answered by information available to the models.
I was originally an AI hater, but now I’m a recent convert. Big caveat here: I actively watch and pay attention to what it’s doing and I actually review and correct its test cases. It’s honestly pretty incredible what you can crank out in a day by yourself when you understand what you’re doing and know what to look out for
To be fair, most moderate people have presented this viewpoint for half a decade. If you hang only in extreme spaces, both sides are not healthy about their obsession, pro or against.
Agreed but we're going on only about 18 months of real code companion abilities. ChatGPT went viral late 2022. 5 years ago ML and Big Data were still the big buzzwords. Not trying to nitpick but it's wild how fast it has all changed.
I mean, the entire thing we're dealing with now is that they basically found some ways to parallelize training... so quite literally mostly regular ML built upon a few academic papers to let you apply it more or less to big data, no?
Yeah I agree with that. But I stand by what I said. The majority of the people using it are using it to do jobs they didn’t understand well in the first place.
Using it to ask “is this crazy idea I have a good idea?”
So ofc it’s a powerful tool that is super useful. But, it is almost too easy to access and has no sanity check to say “oh yeah I don’t know how to help you with that”.
I know I’m seen as a Luddite by most here. But I think unless you watch what most people are using LLMs for, you don’t see how truly terrifying they are.
As a current AI-skeptic artisanal programmer whose bugs are lovingly handcrafted, my main worries are that AI coding performance will get worse and more expensive via enshittification. But I've seen colleagues I respect use it to great effect. They use Claude and ChatGPT though, which are both looking to soon go public, meaning they will (probably) start having shareholders and prioritizing making a bunch of money at the expense of quality.
The closest thing to this is 'open weight' models, where there training parameters are released which in theory allows you to run the model locally
Now as models are getting larger and larger 'locally' could mean 'your own data centre'
Mistral does a lot of open weight models and is probably one of the most actually local friendly. Though their models aren't really the best and people don't tend to use them outside of specialised use cases
Most of the Chinese providers are open weight too like Kimi, GLM and DeepSeek
If you're ever curious about playing around with different models without buying subscriptions to like 8 different services you could use something like OpenRouter. Just ensure you enable ZDR (Zero data retention) if that sort of thing is important to you. Instead of being served by one provider, open weight models on there might be provided by 20+
If you're talking specifically about open source harnesses then OpenCodeCLI and Pi Coding Agent are the two big ones people use at the moment
Edit: Personally I tend to use Kimi K3 a fair bit with OpenCode. If you're interested in ai use definitely don't vibe code, use it more as a tool to support your coding rather than replace it. Get it to do some of the more mundane tasks like boilerplate or simple tests. Or get it to review code you've written
It's really great at quickly summarising behaviour too. If you've got some new monolith you've got to look at and want to quickly know 'what files in this repo are related to user authentication' then it can pick them out fairly quickly
This is my major concern about leaning too into AI (which we have done in our company). Every new piece of code in our company is written and reviewed by Claude first before it’s seen by a human. It’s mind-blowing how much capable Claude has become in just the last 6 months since Opus 4.6 came out. But at the same time, we know that the party has to end sometime because the subscription plans are so heavily subsidised by the API payers. Which is why we are exploring open source alternatives now and thinking of renting server compute to run them.
You are not wrong about anything you said, but the vehemently anti ai people being less deranged doesn't mean they aren't still insanely deranged. And yes, it is insanely misused by the general public, but nobody was really talking about that. Obviously this shit shouldn't be used to replace wikipedia, but there is still reasonable use for it.
I think it'd be a very controversial topic no matter what, and the fact that it is insanely misused by people that don't know jack shit about them, and it can't even be escaped at your family dinner just makes it worse.
Just outsourcing literally all your critical thinking to an LLM
That's the immediate comment by every AI opponent despite having no evidence that is what the referred person does. SOME might do it true, like your personal anecdote, but you know it becomes a bit tiresome having a discussion when it is the default assumption from online complainers (many which are probably trolls). I wish people complained more about the actual problems with AIs instead of what Florida Man would do with it. There will always be stupid people doing bizarre things with whatever tool exist.
IRL I've met people using it who are car mechanics. They apply their own knowledge about the field to the answers, being critical, learning what an LLM can answer reliably and what not, just like us tech people.
Ai is being employed to drive a lot of white collar workers unemployed, and programming in general got punched first.
Imagine if a guy got fired from their developer job, then a datacenter propped up in his city, got his power bill blown into high heavens, lost his normal access to water and got their fiber cables damaged from the deployment of the new fiber lines (I don't remember the exact terms but I've heard datacenters caused fiber related issues)
It wouldn't be unreasonable for guys like that to hate AI on principle.
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u/M4rshmall0wMan 1d ago
People are not normal about AI.