the plane can do a lot of it automatically these days.

It can but nobody is out there flying CAT IIIc autoland approaches because its ‘easier’.

The pilots job is specifically to prevent to finding out phase.

Just install a second autopilot that can take over if the first one fails!

I watch a lot of airplane youtube, and this just seems to be wrong. During critical phases of flight, i.e landing and descending, the pilots have a high workload even with the autopilot. They are directing the autopilot ( which isn’t obvious how to do), they’re communicating, navigating, etc.

Flight crews of the 20th century sometimes had crews of 3 or 4 people to handle all the tasks that are more automated these days. We don’t have dedicated flight engineers or navigators any more – the pilots do these jobs now too.

During the cruise phase of flight, yes the pilots have a lower workload because of the autopilot. But on lots of flights, there might not be much of a cruise at all – they climb, and then descend.

I don’t know how much commercial pilots are required to hand fly the plane, but it is a high workload even with the automation – the automation just helps them do a better job.

Just look at any productivity vs wage growth chart from any country. Anyone who thinks that any efficiency gain will pay off for workers is either naive or part of the grift.

Maybe. I think a sizable group of people would rather put fast fashion back in the bag.

So…have you not heard the damage fast fashion did to the planet? Sure, it make making cloth quicker and cheaper and widely available, but in the end it’s a huge source of chemical waste, landfill waste, and microplastic. Because clothing are so much cheaper to buy new than fixing it, we lost a lot of skilled labour to automation.

The same thing happened everywhere, automation take away human agency, and that take away skill learning. In the end humanity will suffer because less and less people gonna learn how to fix the shit that they rely on. That didn’t happen on accident, that’s by design. We all thought AI gonna upskill a lot of people, but i feels like instead of making a nation of artisan it gonna make a nation of 7/11. Just look at Destin’s struggle to make a fucking bbq brush fully American, the nation of 300millions people can’t even provide parts that fully made within the nation.

No. They weren’t proven wrong, pauperism was the consequence and it was horrible. Luckily we shifted that back to regimes that don’t like to report much on terrible living and environmental conditions so we don’t have the filth at our doorstep.

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It’s the sweatshops, man. The sweatshops suck. I would absolutely rather have one set of tailored clothes, vs. endless variety from sweatshops where Bangladeshi children work for pennies an hour.

Luddites weren’t concerned about the printing press. Their fight was over mechanized looms and knitting frames.

Their concerns were mostly about losing their jobs, as well as the absolute dog shit quality the mechanical machines produced at the time.

In 1814, printers in London did have similar conniptions over the steam press, though.

I try vibe coding from time to time and it’s a mixed bag. When it works it works but then there’s suddenly just code there. It’s like when a colleague implements a feature in a project with multiple devs but since it’s just your personal project you suddenly got put in the code reviewer chair.

When I write code I reason about all the small decisions but when the agent takes over I have to figure out step by step why decisions were made.

I’m still not sold on coding agents and vibecoding but it’s getting better and more usable. The only downside is that a agent doing its thing is now seen as downtime where you could just prompt another agent and work on several projects simultaneously. If anyone ever tells you vibecoding is good because you can work in parallel RUN

~~I try vibe coding from time to time and it’s a mixed bag. When it works it works but then there’s suddenly just code there. It’s like when a colleague implements a feature in a project with multiple devs but since it’s just your personal project you suddenly got put in the code reviewer chair.

When I write code I reason about all the small decisions but when the agent takes over I have to figure out step by step why decisions were made.

I’m still not sold on coding agents and vibecoding but it’s getting better and more usable.
The only downside is that a agent doing its thing is now seen as downtime where you could just prompt another agent and work on several projects simultaneously.~~ If anyone ever tells you vibecoding is good because you can work in parallel RUN

most users are also too accepting of slop work. So the MVP of yesterday is the final product of today.

I’m the “good at exams” type, I find paper writing (or novel writing… 😢) unpleasantly tedious. If we lose the “good at structuring complex thoughts in a way that can be coherently decoded by other humans” types, the “good at exams” types will suffer. We need people who can write good papers and people who can recall diverse facts and arrange them into simple shapes quickly.

Yeah I would have done much better in high school like this, though I don’t think AI will eliminate the poster projects unfortunately.

I wasn’t great at exams, but I think if I re-did university today I’d still do much better because my personal learning style is best when I talk through the material with someone. Sitting in a lecture listening to someone monologue at me, reading a static textbook, those weren’t great. But with LLMs every student now has full-time access to a “live tutor” with infinite patience and no sense of social risk from asking it dumb questions. It’s absolutely my perfect learning environment.

I think it is what the original post is talking about - it literally says “We’re doing this in software now … Nobody’s asking what happens in month 18”!

But is he opinionated or is the LLM’s training corpus opinionated? Why should I care what an autocomplete has to say about this topic?

This isn’t One Hour Hot Dog. If you need a big huge fix right the hell yesterday, you fucked up last week. Possibly last year. And what’s gonna prevent that sort of company-liquidating blunder is a layer of crotchety obsessives who can spend a day reading and then commit one line. ‘Hit engine with hammer: $1. Knowing where to hit: $9,999.’

A system that’s pretty good at guessing a hundred places to try hitting has obvious value. Especially when undo is a thing. But this attitude of ‘the future is now, old man!’ is almost as off-base as the folks insisting a magic coding robot won’t help anybody.

Haha, nah. If you’re generally faster with AI assistance it just means you never actually knew how to do your job properly. Sure it can help you get over some hurdles, make docs searches a bit easier if some library has crap docs, but it’s a 5% speed improvement at best and it’s all worse the moment it sends you down some stupid hallucinated rabbithole.

Fucking scary people are so willing to turn off their brain. When shit goes wrong, they will hold you accountable, not the AI.

an LLM hallucinates, so you can’t just trust it, which means you have to be able to assess when it’s doing the wrong thing

Unless you can define what the right thing is. Then you just have it write proper tests, and it’s able to verify itself.

Yeah, I’ve been tinkering with coding agents for a while now and it feels like some sort of “phase transition” happened earlier this year - the models and their harnesses went from being the sort of clumsy barely-passable student coders that people make fun of to being actually highly competent. Lately even the small local models have reached that level - I’ve been using Qwen3.8 27B on my own machine and it’s been doing just fine. I suspect a lot of the folks making fun of them tried them early on and wrote them off, not giving the latest versions a second chance.

The compiler comparison works there too, IMO. I remember back when I was learning the tricks of the trade there were all sorts of ways you were supposed to write code to trick compilers into generating more efficient results. Coding standards would say to use ++i instead of i++ for incrementing loop indices, use x*0.1 instead of x/10 because division was way more expensive than multiplication, using memcpy instead of copying values with =, using int instead of bool, and so forth. Lots of stuff. Some of it was never useful, it was just folklore and superstition. Other stuff did make a difference with early compilers but modern ones know these tricks themselves and can often apply them better than the human programmer can. So the old-school greybeards who still insist on doing that stuff can actually make things worse these days (disclaimer: my beard is pretty grey these days too).

I expect so too will this “hah, vibe slop” attitude eventually pass away. AI is getting quite good quite quickly.

The number of Chesterton’s fences getting bulldozed right now is scary to contemplate.

It can’t read their mind… but it can read their comments.

Just like you, if you found their code, and went ‘why the heck is it like this.’

Heck, I’ve been using them to untangle years worth of me working on codebases. I’ve got a lot of random little scripts and “applications” and whatnot that I threw together to perform various tasks on my home computer over the years and most of them were extremely sloppy because “who cares, this is just for me and just for this one weird thing I need to do.” I’ve been pointing my AI agent at these things and telling it to clean them up. I’m hoping this isn’t putting me a lot higher on Skynet’s naughty list when the time comes for the robots to punish all those who have been mean to them.

I have a little more hope for future generations. Regardless of if you are primarily using ai to speed up a traditional work flow or vibe coding, there still are more and less effective ways to get things done. I’ve found if I write sonething I’m familiar with like bash or Python, I “know enough” to write functions and refactor incrementally. It’s a methodical process which produces code better than I can write by myself in less time.

Compare that to when I write Lisp. There it’s more or less throw shit at the wall until I somewhat get what I want. It takes longer and can be next to impossible to extend or effectively refactor.

Based on that observation of myself, I think we’ll find two (and probably more) kinds of programmers in the future. Ones who use it as an assistant to speed up a traditional workflow, and those who produce the slop that we are afraid of.

Perhaps to give us any amount of additional hope/comparison to now. There still have been people who have programmed now who create slop. And that comes to the way we use references like stack exchange or the Arch Wiki. Are you copy and pasting while learning what things mean and learning in the process? Or are you just stringing things together to get results at all? I don’t think we would argue those references made all of us worse.

So I think it’s an apt concern, but we’ll have to wait to see what it’s like whole sale. I was a doubter for a long time, but I’ve come to understand where Torvalds et al are coming from.

That’s a very good point