Ben Ui wrote a very good list of reasons why he refuses to use AI:

• Deskilling
• Built on Stolen Labour
• Negative Environmental Impacts
• Introduces Reliance on Subscription Service
• I Like Programming
• Fundamentally Hostile to Human Learning
• Worse Quality Code
• It's a Black Box
• Inaccuracy and Bad User Experience
• Fundamentally Designed to Make Stuff up
• The Statistical Average is the Least Interesting Result
• Inability to Solve Novel Problems
• Used to Obfuscate Responsibility
• LLMs Ruin the Web
• Non-deterministic
• Valuing Your Time over Others is Selfish
• Suspiciously Similar to NFTs, Crypto

What I would add to the list, is the horrible job of categorizing raw data for LLMs, so that its users don’t see the worst of humanity when using it. Plus, most of that work happens in developing countries, which basically makes it modern colonialism.

benui.ca/why-i-refuse-ai

The arguments around the use of "AI" are exhausting. I'm tired of re-typing my reasons, so this document is a summary of some of the many reasons why …

My tired brain just found the perfect term for people, who are way too optimistic about “AI” writing code: brogrammers.

Here’s what the “AI will replace developers” crowd fundamentally misunderstands: code is not an asset—it’s a liability. Every line must be maintained, debugged, secured, and eventually replaced. The real asset is the business capability that code enables.

alonso.network/the-recurring-cycle-of-developer-replacement-hype

AI isn't replacing developers, it's transforming them.

If some company were to create a tool, that actually manages to replace and supersede programmers, it would use the tool to dominate the market instead of selling it as a service.

Big Tech will never make programming as easy as writing a couple of prompts. They are profitable because of the complexity of software development.

If your ability to write good code or fix bugs depends on getting lucky with an AI slot machine, you’re not a programmer — you’re a code gambler.

I’m surprised that there are programmers, who actually believe adding non-deterministic tools to developer toolchains will improve productivity—unless their definition of productivity excludes quality. Because quality depends on consistency and reliability. Two things non-deterministic tools cannot offer.

The software industry has always struggled to put user experience over developer experience, but at least we’ve put our trust in deterministic tools like compilers, linters and language servers, which provide consistent feedback.

Now some people put their faith in tools, that return different outputs for the same input. How’s that gonna help with reliability and consistency?

Software quality should not depend on luck with the next token prediction.

I have a bad feeling that „You’ve prompted it wrong“ is the new „It works on my machine“.

Externalising thinking to an "AI" is convenient, because giving in to stupidity is convenient. Chatbots are a shortcut to incompetence disguised as a shortcut to knowledge.

Great post highlighting the problems of depending on ChatBots to do your programming work:

Because you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the cruel joke. We’ll fill this industry with people who think they’re good, because their bot passed CI. They'll float through, confident, while the real ones - the hungry ones - get chewed up by a system that doesn’t value understanding anymore. Just output. Just tokens per second.

And what’s worse, we’ll normalize this mediocrity. Cement it in tooling. Turn it into a best practice. We'll enshrine this current bloated, sluggish, over-abstracted hellscape as the pinnacle of software. The idea that building something lean and wild and precise, or even squeezing every last drop of performance out of a system, will sound like folklore.

If that happens? If the last real programmers are drowned in a sea of button-clicking career-chasers - then I pity the smart outsider kids to come after me.

Defer your thinking to the bot, and we all rot.

Ed’s latest (very long) post is putting a lot of what I experienced in my career and what we all experience right now into words. We are living in the era of business idiots.

wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot

Think of the Business Idiot as a kind of con artist, except the con has become the standard way of doing business for an alarmingly large part of …

Even the end of Daft Punk is a symbol for integrity, vision and humanity. Thomas Bangaltar explains their decision to stop Daft Punk:

"My concerns about the rise of artificial intelligence go beyond its use in music creation," he says, suddenly serious.

"2001: A Space Odyssey is maybe my favourite film and the way [Stanley] Kubrick presented it is so relevant today - because he is asking exactly the question that we have to ask ourselves about technology and the obsolescence of man."

That's always been his position, he stresses. It's just that people sometimes misinterpreted Daft Punk's aesthetic as an unquestioning embrace of digital culture.

"I almost consider the character of the robots like a Marina Abramović performance art installation that lasted for 20 years," he says.

"We tried to use these machines to express something extremely moving that a machine cannot feel, but a human can. We were always on the side of humanity and not on the side of technology."

That's why 2021 was the right time to pull the plug on the project.

"As much as I love this character, the last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot."

AI “Co-Pilots” successfully automated creating technical debt. Code is the easy part. Humans deeply understanding computer systems, is the hard part.

I prefer connecting with people, who grow their humane intelligence rather than artificial intelligence.