yeah, exactly. there is already a lot of code shipping at quality levels we don't care to discuss in polite company. not because the coders are necessarily bad, but the businesses are intensely cost sensitive. and if you replace those jobs with LLMs, you just move that wage pressure elsewhere. - ThreadSky

graydon-pub.bsky.social • 6 days ago

yeah, exactly. there is already a lot of code shipping at quality levels we don't care to discuss in polite company. not because the coders are necessarily bad, but the businesses are intensely cost sensitive. and if you replace those jobs with LLMs, you just move that wage pressure elsewhere.

Comments

graydon-pub.bsky.social•6 days ago

(part of me, darkly, thinks FOSS people are so critical of this because deep in our hearts we know we did a similar wage pressure commodification routine to proprietary people 20 years ago, and are either displacing guilt or can't stand the thought of being next. capitalism is terrible: news at 11.)

mitsuhiko.at•6 days ago

(which is why I'm baffled that OSS people are not completely embracing LLM stuff. I came into Open Source via software piracy. I thought the whole point of sharing and not caring about copyrights all that much was foundational to some people.)

steveklabnik.com•6 days ago

yeah i've said "I thought we were here to abolish IP not strengthen it" several times

den-antares.bsky.social•6 days ago

The objections in OSS tend to be about the quality of AI work and the amount of (unpaid) labor needed to review and clean it up. I've looked into using AI for CI-style automated code review screens and concluded that the 80% false positive rate made it unusuable.

graydon-pub.bsky.social•6 days ago

those are very reasonable objections! but they're far from the most acute I hear. a significant contingent are in full butlerian jihad mode.

tcmx3.bsky.social•6 days ago

Despite having put food on my table by making and deploying ML models before, I will admit I'm getting close to that point.

Granted, the first target of my hatred is image/music gen stuff, which yeah I would go Butlerian Jihad on.

I think many people have motivations that are not as reasonable...

tcmx3.bsky.social•6 days ago

as yours appear to be. Frankly, I'm even sympathetic to what you're saying to a large degree.

But individually reasonable stances can be combined into bad faith arguments and that is my conclusion about many of the pro-generative folks; and it has ramped up my intransigence about the whole thing.

den-antares.bsky.social•6 days ago

I hear a lot of Butlerian Jihad from artists and such who've always been a lot more pro-copyright. And also mad at everything from Photoshop to bittorrent.

Are you seeing much of that in OSS communities too?

graydon-pub.bsky.social•6 days ago

yes, to paraphrase only slightly: a lot of FOSS people treat it as a scam that just generates pure garbage that people are simply deluded into thinking is real, while ruining the world and the internet and everything they hold dear, and therefore anyone who touches it is infected and dead to them.

den-antares.bsky.social•6 days ago

So far I've only really found AI helpful for a StackOverflow replacement and for making quick demos. I looked at that cline tool @steveklabnik.com linked but it seems tied to Claude, and the dependance on a closed-source server makes me a lot less interested.

steveklabnik.com•6 days ago

(Not tied to Claude, is tied to a closed source server; I believe)

den-antares.bsky.social•6 days ago

Looks like there's a DeepSeek option. Might be worth trying at after all

den-antares.bsky.social•6 days ago

That being said, I've seen a few OSS devs complain about GPL code being "stolen" by AI and that's a bit a culture shock to put it mildly.

graydon-pub.bsky.social•6 days ago

eh, I mean, the FSF has spent years of lawyer time in GPL enforcement actions, it's congruent.

steveklabnik.com•6 days ago

i've been phrasing this as "oh, the profession that automates away other jobs is suddenly very concerned about the effects of automation when it might automate away *their* jobs? funny" but that's so petty

graydon-pub.bsky.social•6 days ago

I think it is fair to ask people to look in a mirror if they've been espousing terrible politics forever but now the leopard is hungry for their face. but also it's not shameful to want to protect your livelihood and we shouldn't be too mean about that. everyone wants that, it's normal and good.

graydon-pub.bsky.social•6 days ago

to me the gap is like: suppose we all agree we want a substantially different economic system than the one we have. but then .. that's not forthcoming! what exactly do we do in the meantime? what do we try to organize for or against? it is perplexing. I have a wide tolerance for differing answers.

steveklabnik.com•6 days ago

100%

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