> at the moment I’m mostly in tune with Thomas Ptacek’s My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts. It’s long and (fortunately) well-written and I (mostly) find it hard to disagree with.
Ptacek has spent the past week getting dunked on in public for that article. I don't think it lends you a lot of credence to align with it.
> If you’re interested in that thinking, here’s a sample; a slide deck by a Keith Riegert for the book-publishing business which, granted, is a bit stagnant and a whole lot overconcentrated these days. I suspect scrolling through it will produce a strong emotional reaction for quite a few readers here. It’s also useful in that it talks specifically about costs.
You're not wrong here. I read the deck and the word that comes to mind is "disgusting". Then again, the morally bankrupt have always done horrible things to make a quick buck — AI is no different.
> Getting "dunked" only means it's controversial, not necessarily wrong.
It undermines the author's position of being "moderate" if they align with perhaps the most decisive and aggressively written pro-AI puff piece doing the rounds.
> Developers who don't embrace AI tools are going to get left behind.
I'm not sure how to respond to this. I am doubtful a comment on Hacker News will change your mind, but I'd ask you to think about two questions.
If AI is going to be as revolutionary in our industry as other changes of the past, like web or mobile, then how would a similar statement sound around those? Is saying "Developers who don't embrace mobile development are going to get left behind" a sensible statement? I don't think so, even with how huge mobile has been. Same with other big shifts. "Developers who don't embrace microservice architecture are going to get left behind"? Maybe more comparable, but equally silly. So, why would it be different than those? Do you think LLM tools are more impactful than any other change in history?
Second, if AI truly as as groundbreakingly revolutionary as you suggest, what happens to us? Maybe you'll call me a luddite, raging against the loss of jobs when confronted with automated looms, but you'll have to forgive me for not welcoming my own destruction with open arms.
I understand your skepticism. I think, in 20 years, when we look back, we'll see this time was the beginning of a fundamental paradigm shift in software development. This will be similar in magnitude to the move from desktop to web development in the 90's. If I told you, in 1996, that "developers who don't embrace web development will be left behind", it would be an accurate statement.
You have to compare it at the right level. A _developer_ who did not embrace mobile is fine, because the market _grew_ as a result of mobile. For developers, there were strictly more opportunities to branch out and find work. For _companies_ however, yes, if they failed to embrace mobile many of them absolutely were hard-passed (or lost substantial market share) compared against those who did. Just like those who failed to embrace the internet were hard passed before that.
A more apt comparison might be comparing it to the arrival of IDE's and quality source control? Do you think developers (outside of niche cases) working out of text editors and rsyncing code to production are able to find jobs as easily as those who are well versed in using e.g. a modern language tooling + Github in a team environment? Because I've directly seen many such developers being turned down by screening and interviews; I've seen companies shed talent when they refused to embrace git while clinging to SVN and slow deployment processes; said talent would go on to join companies that were later IPOing in the same space for a billion+ while their former colleagues were laid off. To me it feels quite similar to those moments.
To be fair, you had the same response to Kenton Varda's post about using Claude Code to build an OAuth component for Cloudflare, to the point of calling his work just a tiny step away from "vibe coding".
I called that project one step away from vibe coding, which I stand behind -- 'tiny' is your editorializing. But his thing wasn't as summarily dunked-on, or ratio'd, or however you want to call it, as your thing was, I don't think! ;)
I don't feel like I got "ratio'd" at all? I'd say the response broke down roughly 50/50, as I expected it to. I got "dunked on" here yesterday for suggesting that userland TCP/IP stacks were a good idea; I'm not all that sensitive to "dunking".
Have you tried any of the tools, like Cursor or Zed? They increase productivity if you use them correctly. If you give them quality inputs like well written, spec-like prompts, instruct them to work in phases, provide feedback on testing, the results can be very, very good. Unsurprisingly, this is similar to what you need to give to a human to also get positive results.
Ptacek has spent the past week getting dunked on in public for that article. I don't think it lends you a lot of credence to align with it.
> If you’re interested in that thinking, here’s a sample; a slide deck by a Keith Riegert for the book-publishing business which, granted, is a bit stagnant and a whole lot overconcentrated these days. I suspect scrolling through it will produce a strong emotional reaction for quite a few readers here. It’s also useful in that it talks specifically about costs.
You're not wrong here. I read the deck and the word that comes to mind is "disgusting". Then again, the morally bankrupt have always done horrible things to make a quick buck — AI is no different.