Simon Willison’s Weblog

Don't fall into the anti-AI hype. I'm glad someone was brave enough to say this. There is a lot of anti-AI sentiment in the software development community these days. Much of it is justified, but if you let people convince you that AI isn't genuinely useful for software developers or that this whole thing will blow over soon it's becoming clear that you're taking on a very real risk to your future career.

As Salvatore Sanfilippo puts it:

It does not matter if AI companies will not be able to get their money back and the stock market will crash. All that is irrelevant, in the long run. It does not matter if this or the other CEO of some unicorn is telling you something that is off putting, or absurd. Programming changed forever, anyway.

I do like this hopeful positive outlook on what this could all mean, emphasis mine:

How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was ingested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that, because I see this as a continuation of what I tried to do all my life: democratizing code, systems, knowledge. LLMs are going to help us to write better software, faster, and will allow small teams to have a chance to compete with bigger companies. The same thing open source software did in the 90s.

This post has been the subject of heated discussions all day today on both Hacker News and Lobste.rs.