My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts

Linked to in the aforementioned post by Manton, this post by Thomas Ptacek for Fly.io hits home and deserves a callout:

Some of the smartest people I know share a bone-deep belief that AI is a fad — the next iteration of NFT mania. I’ve been reluctant to push back on them, because, well, they’re smarter than me. But their arguments are unserious, and worth confronting. Extraordinarily talented people are doing work that LLMs already do better, out of spite. […]

Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. If anything we build endures, it won’t be because the codebase was beautiful.

Besides, that’s not really what happens. If you’re taking time carefully golfing functions down into graceful, fluent, minimal functional expressions, alarm bells should ring. You’re yak-shaving. The real work has depleted your focus. You’re not building: you’re self-soothing.

Which, wait for it, is something LLMs are good for. They devour schlep, and clear a path to the important stuff, where your judgement and values really matter.

Emphasis above is mine. This whole post is so brilliantly written, it’s worth a read and I could quote the whole thing.