Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

Summary

antirez 1 hour ago. 15483 views. I love writing software, line by line. It could be said that my career was a continuous effort to create software well written, minimal, where the human touch was the fundamental feature. I also hope for a society where the last are not forgotten. Moreover, I don't want AI to economically succeed, I don't care if the current economic system is subverted (I could be very happy, honestly, if it goes in the direction of a massive redistribution of wealth). But, I would not respect myself and my intelligence if my idea of software and society would impair my vision: facts are facts, and AI is going to change programming forever. In 2020 I left my job in order to write a novel about AI, universal basic income, a society that adapted to the automation of work facing many challenges. At the very end of 2024 I opened a YouTube channel focused on AI, its use in coding tasks, its potential social and economical effects. But while I recognized what was going to happen very early, I thought that we had more time before programming would be completely reshaped, at least a few years. I no longer believe this is the case. Recently, state of the art LLMs are able to complete large subtasks or medium size projects alone, almost unassisted, given a good set of hints about what the end result should be. The degree of success you'll get is related to the kind of programming you do (the more isolated, and the more textually representable, the better: system programming is particularly apt), and to your ability to create a mental representation of the problem to communicate to the LLM. But, in general, it is now clear that for most projects, writing the code yourself is no longer sensible, if not to have fun. In the past week, just prompting, and inspecting the code to provide guidance from time to time, in a few hours I did the following four tasks, in hours instead of weeks: 1. I modified my linenoise library to support UTF-8, and created a framework fo...