Simon Willison’s Weblog

My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts (via) Thomas Ptacek's frustrated tone throughout this piece perfectly captures how it feels sometimes to be an experienced programmer trying to argue that "LLMs are actually really useful" in many corners of the internet.

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. [...]

You’ve always been responsible for what you merge to main. You were five years go. And you are tomorrow, whether or not you use an LLM. [...]

Reading other people’s code is part of the job. If you can’t metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates: skills issue! How are you handling the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline?

And on the threat of AI taking jobs from engineers (with a link to an old comment of mine):

So does open source. We used to pay good money for databases.

We're a field premised on automating other people's jobs away. "Productivity gains," say the economists. You get what that means, right? Fewer people doing the same stuff. Talked to a travel agent lately? Or a floor broker? Or a record store clerk? Or a darkroom tech?

The post has already attracted 695 comments on Hacker News in just two hours, which feels like some kind of record even by the usual standards of fights about AI on the internet.

Update: Thomas, another hundred or so comments later:

A lot of people are misunderstanding the goal of the post, which is not necessarily to persuade them, but rather to disrupt a static, unproductive equilibrium of uninformed arguments about how this stuff works. The commentary I've read today has to my mind vindicated that premise.