The Copilot Delusion
The Copilot Delusion
The thing I hate the most about AI and it's ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul—brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots. [...]
There was once magic here. There was once madness.
Kids would stay up all night on IRC with bloodshot eyes, trying to render a cube in OpenGL without segfaulting their future. They cared. They would install Gentoo on a toaster just to see if it’d boot. They knew the smell of burnt voltage regulators and the exact line of assembly where Doom hit 10 FPS on their calculator. These were artists. They wrote code like jazz musicians—full of rage, precision, and divine chaos.
Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to "review this AI-generated patchset" for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.
Unusually well-written piece on the threat AI poses to programming as an art form.
The thing I hate the most about the printing press and its ease of access: the slow, painful death of the scribe's soul—brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By type. By machines. [...]
There was once magic here. There was once madness.
Monks would stay up all night in candlelit scriptoriums with bloodshot eyes, trying to render illuminated manuscripts without smudging their life's work. They cared. They would mix pigments from crushed beetles just to see if they'd hold. They knew the smell of burnt parchment and the exact angle of quill where their hand would cramp after six hours. These were artists. They wrote letters like master craftsmen—full of devotion, precision, and divine chaos.
Now? We're building a world where that devotion gets mechanized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to "review this Gutenberg broadsheet" for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The scriptorium will become a print shop. The quill a lever.
Stupid comparison, tbh. Scribing is just boring and repetitive work, programming is cognitive work.
That's wildly incorrect and somehow serves to underscore the original point.
Scribes were not glorified photocopiers; they had to reconcile poorly written and translated sources, do a lot of research on imperfect and incomplete information, try to figure out if the notes in the margin should be included in future transcriptions, etc. Their work required real subject matter expertise, training and technique, was painstaking and excruciating, and many hand written manuscripts are absolutely works of art.
There are definitely parts of programming that are boring and repetitive. I’ve been using AI to speed that up. I still do the creative parts 100% myself.
The slow, painful death of technological privacy - brought not by war, not by scarcity, but by convenience of another app that saves you 3 clicks per transaction paired with the forced usage of certain functions within an existing environment
I'm more and more distancing myself with computers, it already was "use this library", then use this app, now it seems just ask the "AI".
I took up painting and chess, viable replacements I hope.
I want to do this, too, but computers is how I earn money.
It won't be for long after Great Depression 2 hits :(
It amazes me how often I see the argument that people react this way to all tech. To some extent that's true, but it assumes that all tech turns out to be useful. History is littered with technologies that either didn't work or didn't turn out to serve any real purpose. This is why we're all riding around in giant mono-wheel vehicles and Segways.
When you outsource the thinking, you outsource the learning.
Stealing this because it manages to put technical concerns into hand-waving manager speak.
And a pretty solid article. I think leaning on micro-enhancements to performance a little to hard at the end but the rest jibes with my experiences working in a large company where non-technical bloviators are leading the charge of changing the landscape of a field they don't understand and have no training in.
"We're bringing AI to OKRs!" they say hungrily, as their weak arms attempt to pull the rug.
"Sure you are", I say, pretending to stumble.
I get when people say: "hey, this happened with every new tech..." But this one in particular gas many inherent problems: it's built on stolen material, it doesn't encourage critical thinking and it will create mini socio cognitive bubbles, distancing each other more and more. It's built that way because the people that makes it want it to be like that.
Edit: the stolen material includes the way artists executes it's art, say drawing (ghibli studios for example) or music, not just copyright
That rather sounds like it was written by an ai?
You're the only human Lemmy user.
Article was ai written. Like all of it. ChatGPT speaks a way and this is it.
This is just obviously not the case to anyone who bothers reading it. It's an original piece of writing.
The only thing that could hint at AI here is the use of em-dashes, which is a bullshit tell—I use them all the time myself as well. They're right there for anyone with a compose key on Linux.
That will happen to most "artforms" or jobs that require research. I notice that on myself as well. I now ask an AI for regex stringsor when I want to implement a function I'm unsure about, I ask an AI to see what they are doing first. Critical thinking is still involved, but less than it used to.
Critical thinking is still involved, but less than it used to.
Well at least you are honest about it lol
You can use the same argument for just about everything. "In the past it was better". Remember when kids new how to actually write with pens, and had to send a letter and wait a few weeks until it even arrived? The damn telephone and internet 'ruined' it with their ease of access and convenience.
Did you read the article? Because there certainly is no such argument in there.
This is a trash take.
I just wrote the ability to take a DX9 game, stealthy convert it to DX9Ex, remap all the incompatibility commands so it works, proxy the swapchain texture, setup a shared handle for that proxy texture, create a DX11 swapchain, read that proxy into DX11, and output it in true, native HDR.
All with the assistance of CoPilot chat to help make sense of the documentation and CoPilot generation and autocomplete to help setup the code.
All in one day.
And you used all that water and power just to make dark "ahit".
🥲
The point is to show it's uncapped, since SDR is just up to 200 not. It's not tonemapped in the image.
But, please, continue to argue in bad faith and complete ignorance.
Hi, we still exist. I still build old shit to do things it's not supposed to do. We're not going away.