I don't resist progress, but I have a growing feeling that mankind uses it mostly for disgraceful purposes.
· Stanisław Lem
Dear Jack,
There's currently a post at the top of Hacker News called "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts". In it, Thomas Ptacek lays out a number of arguments against using LLMs for coding and quickly dismisses them with some version of "You're not doing it right". As someone even farther down the negative axis of the "AI" scale than skeptic, but a person nevertheless existing in tech and seeing LLMs used by many of my peers (and even foisted on us by management), I figured I should read Thomas' piece and give him a fair shot at changing my mind.
Unfortunately, the "arguments" he addresses are all strawmen, mostly "but bugs" or "but code style". I think it's obvious to any American with critical thinking skills that the actual reasons to oppose LLMs are:
- They are built on theft
- They require a lot of energy
- They replace human workers
I call out America specifically here because it is both where most "AI" companies are based, and it is also a nation whose sociopolitical mechanisms are perfectly content to let its citizenry suffer and die for lack of housing and medical care, if these unfortunate souls are not able to find work. Given this, I had hoped Thomas (an American) would understand that his encouragement to ditch junior developers in favor of $20/month LLM subscriptions is not merely putting someone out of a job; such decisions terminate the American Dream for one of the last remnants of our populace who can still lay claim to it.
An aside.
Learning to code literally took me from making sandwiches at Subway to where I am now -- able to afford a nice house in a safe neighborhood and provide a stable financial situation for my wife and kids. Thanks to unions, Americans used to be able to rely on such a trajectory with only a high school diploma; now the proportion of us who can still achieve this level of success without the tailwind of generational wealth is already vanishingly small, and people like Ptacek want to pull the rug out from under this last holdout too. To what end, exactly? Increasing some fucking shareholder value?
This is personal for me. I grew up fascinated by video games and early family computers. I am a second generation coder, and wrote my first program (a BASIC joke which beeped out the melody to "Stars and Stripes Forever" forever, on repeat without the option to quit) on a Tandy model 200 my mother had on loan from the university when I was in elementary school. When I bombed out of grad school, rudderless and disillusioned about the music industry I thought would be my future, I turned back to coding, learning ActionScript so I could create games and animations in Flash. As I said before, that lucky choice slowly buoyed me, allowing me to pay off debt and start accruing equity as I got into JavaScript and then Python, constantly reading and testing out new ideas.
I say all this for context, to give you some idea how it feels seeing so many of my compatriots turn their backs on society. The dark patterns and engagement-optimizing algorithms were bad enough -- beyond the pale in some cases -- but "AI" is something else again. We're turning on our own here. Having reached a safe height, we're burning the bridges we crossed to get here. It's the exact same "Fuck you I got mine" attitude for which we've rightly lampooned and criticized boomers for decades.
Two things are blindingly obvious: LLM adoption will cause poverty and death in the US, and the real solutions to this (i.e. fundamental changes to American capitalism) are not coming soon. As long as access to healthcare and housing requires a job, it is in our best interests to aim for full employment and living wages. If you can't agree on that, I can't help you; either you're brainwashed or you simply don't care when people suffer.
Jack, I really have no idea what this landscape is going to look like when you're ready to enter the workforce. I hope we're meaningfully transitioning to a post-scarcity economy, but realistically we'll probably be living in a country even more cut up and dumbed down thanks to "AI". Personally, I love to see folks on Bluesky dunk on this tech by calling it the next NFT or the next blockchain, but I don't think that's right. I've seen too many decision-makers swoon over these chatbots to imagine they'll die off that easily. I believe they're going to redraw the map of white collar work whether folks who know better protest it or not. Instead of NFTs, "AI" is going to be the next automobile.
I've said this on Bluesky. I love cars from the perspective of industrial design and tinkering, but I will be the first to admit they have completely ruined the places Americans inhabit for over a century. We are only now starting to emerge from the oil boom fever-dream of the automobile, and even in 2025, functional public transit, bike infrastructure and pedestrian spaces are largely the domain of dreamers and planners. I don't want this to be how "AI" goes. And given the current political landscape here, we're not starting off with an abundance of forethought. So I am worried for you.
The title of this post is something folks used to shout at early adopters of the car. I love it. Get a fucking horse. It feels cathartic in this moment, but also portentiously doomed. The drivers did not get horses, afterall, and now everything is stroads and stripmalls and parking mandates. I'm going to do what I can to prevent "AI" from running over us all the same way, not only by abstaining and shaming those who use it, but also by advocating for the only real solutions that matter right now: universal healthcare and the right to housing.
Cross your little fingers for me, bud. For us all. Maybe when you're 18 this will all be charmingly anachronistic 🤞