[trwhite]

> all HN devs as a homogenous mass

Many of the highly upvoted posts of the last ~month have been about "vibe engineering" and "context engineering". The comments on these posts suggest an air of enthusiasm one doesn't see on posts about programming.

> consider a more nuanced question

As a long-time poster here I simply do not agree.

> I disagree with you on both

Your rationale?

By using AI to automate things you once did manually, you are:

- Helping a model do something better you were once able to do (and get someone to pay you to do). Such a time may arise when your input is no longer required.

- Propagating the idea that such things no longer require the skill they once did.

- Propagating the idea that it doesn't take you as long to do something you once did, begging the question why employers would pay you as much as they once did.

- Failing to continue to learn as you once did (that numerous studies have since confirmed; people who use generative AI don't exhibit the same critical thinking as those who don't).

[DamonHD]

I use high-level tools to automate things all the time, such as scripts to avoid error-prone manual tasks, and high-level languages rather than writing low-level assembly code byte-by-byte ... usually, when they the right things to do.

However, given that my life now is mostly working on trying to reduce global warming, and I have fairly high standards for my output I think, I don't by default want to use tools which (a) cause large amounts of needless carbon emissions one way or another and (b) inject random lies/nonsense into their output which is hard to track down and may in fact slow me down overall.

I have been listening carefully to talented people I trust who are getting coding assistant results that they are happy with (even given their TLC to fix the errors and lies), and will carefully evaluate for myself when the hype has diminished a little, as I have with other new tech, and when mostly the good stuff is still standing.

But at the moment I am learning a whole new complex toolset in a different area, in building physics to reduce emissions, and cannot really do both at once properly even if I was at my 18yo sharpest and wasn't trying to have a good social life too.

As I boringly repeat, I am not anti AI. I have a near 40yo AI degree and have hundreds of thousands of product units on the market featuring what is at least clever data science. I do object to overhyped LLMs from vastly rich peeps wanting to hoard even more resources while being oblivious to those who have provided the intellectial property that they have perloined, while flattening the creators' servers with badly behaved bots too!

I have already nominally retired (though am working on a self-funded PhD) so the "I will lose my job" cannot apply and is a counter example to one of your universal claims.

[trwhite]

Why are you so argumentative? _Some_ of what you're saying is relevant, but not this. I asked a sensible question.