Hell, I have NO IDEA what those really mean, but it’s 3 seconds away via prompt.
This is where I stopped reading, and it’s so emblematic of the argumentation I routinely see.
“I have no first hand knowledge of your domain, but let me tell you why you’re wrong about it” is just a derivative of “everything I don’t understand is simple”, and I will have no part in that.
I can’t even tell you how many times people around me do this.
At some point x feature was requested.
First thing was an AI prompt asking how it could be done and how long it would take.
“3 days” was the response. They had never implemented that before, ever. Told the client right away.
It took around a month to get to a working state.
AI is really great at giving a beginner tier understanding of something, which people then take and run with as if they are now an expert.
So someone who isn’t an expert in implementing financial services isn’t allowed entry into a discussion about LLMs in software develoment? Weird gate to keep, but sure.
I could see “well this doesn’t apply to the financial space” as an argument, though I wouldn’t really buy that in this case. But “fuck off you don’t have the specific domain knowledge of this other dude” is a weird bar to set.
That’s not gatekeeping, but okay. Gatekeeping is about withholding knowledge & information from a group of people for a personal benefit. It’s not gatekeeping to stop every clueless idiot from blurting out their opinion and expecting everyone to respect it, because otherwise you’re a gatekeeper (I don’t want to imply the author of the article is a clueless idiot, this is a generalized statement).
to restrict access to (something of value, such as information, knowledge, or resources) in order to exert power or control over a person or group
The person I was responding to was restricting the author’s access to the conversation by publicly refusing to engage with them over a trivial, irrelevant matter. So if that’s not gatekeeping, then clearly they’re calling the author a clueless idiot, which is just plain rude.
You have it plain sight. Refusing to engage with someone is not gatekeeping. Your definition pretty much aligns with what I said.
And if someone doesn’t have any idea what they’re talking about, then maybe they shouldn’t take part in the talking. You can’t tell me that you‘ll take cybersecurity advice from someone who saw a movie about hacking.
Which doesn’t mean that clueless people have nothing of value to add, but it’s unlikely (especially in highly factual discussions).
From the author’s own website, they left AWS to join their current company as VP of Software (whatever that title means but seems obvious that it’s software related). My immediate assumption would not be that this person is clueless about software development. Maybe they are, but assuming that from the start is just engaging in bad faith.
Refusing to engage with someone is not gatekeeping.
You show up to a party and talk to a group talking about using LLMs to make software to try to make friends. They look at you. You are a developer, but you don’t specifically work in financial services so they just ignore you. In fact, they say out loud at the party “hey you don’t know jack shit about anything because you don’t work in financial services”. The whole discussion they’re having has nothing to do with financial services.
You don’t consider that gatekeeping?
By definition, that in itself isn’t gatekeeping. And I personally wouldn’t feel gatekept, just excluded. In the article the author evaluates the usefulness of AI for a field which they admit to have no clue about. And it reads like that AI gives you the knowledge of that field, just 3 seconds away, and everyone is obsolete now, which isn’t true. While it can give you the knowledge, you still need the understanding, and understanding is what makes people good at something, not knowledge in itself. I don’t understand your argument. The situation you described is not what I‘ve been talking about.
- It‘s not about making friends
- It‘s about factual discussions
- It‘s about people trying to contribute to those discussions with arguments they can’t reason about, which normally isn’t particularly helpful, and if someone acts like a knowledgeable dick, then I don’t feel bad excluding them at all
But it’s specific domain knowledge all the way down.
We have a special term for the few remaining generalist web developers without a domain specialization: “WordPress Admin”.
This is literally the premise of the article.
The person I responded to stopped reading because the author doesn’t have specific domain knowledge of financial services.
Why does this read like it was written by Claude?
Because it obviously was.
The dashes, the short sentences, the bullet points, the overly familiar tone that seems LinkedIn-ish. All of it sounds like AI.
“You’re not wrong” that’s about all you need to read to know it’s AI
The author may be, in theory, right, but it counts for nothing if the people in charge don’t recognize where that actual value is. Which MANY of them do not.
There is one other thing not mentioned that LLMs are bad at: being accountable. When your customers come complaining at 2:30 in the morning that the payments are failing, your manager isn’t going to the LLM to ask what the fuck broke and why the fuck he’s awake after 3 hours of sleep. He’s going to you to do that. And when you’re able to tell him that your downstream service is having an outage because AWS shit the bed again, he’s going to trust your word. Will he choose to replace you with a LLM? Maybe, but he’ll never be able to put out those fires without you.
he’ll never be able to put out those fires without you.
Why do you say that? I would guess that we are very few years away before we have AI systems monitoring for downtimes and such that can quickly diagnose and fix issues that occur completely automatically - in fact I would not be surprised if this already exists today.
Never? Never is a long time.
That said, by the time you can actually run a significant software company without any programmers it seems likely that you could also run most white collar firms with vastly fewer employees and then we’re going to have bigger problems.
Never? Never is a long time.
Yep, it is.
You can’t solve people problems without people. It doesn’t matter how fancy your calculator is, whether it can only do addition or it’s capable of simulating the universe. Someone has to take the blame (and accept the credit).
Why? You could have an entire company run by a single person if that is required for legal purposes. Or even multiple companies.
It would pretty much require strong AI / AGI, but are you really suggesting that we will never have AGI?
No one can tell whether AGI in the form of something akin to biological brains will happen. How will we build something we can’t comprehend the architecture of?
Also, I think their point was not that AGI will never happen, it’s more that it doesn’t matter whether it happens or not, because AI/AGI will not solve our problems (well, it will solve some, but create so many more that in the end we’ve really achieved nothing).
I think we are further from AGI than people think. I doubt I will live to see it.
Also, I think their point was not that AGI will never happen, it’s more that it doesn’t matter whether it happens or not, because AI/AGI will not solve our problems
This exactly. AGI can never solve people problems because those problems are inherent to people. Social problems, for example, don’t magically disappear because you have a magic box that does everything.
I think we are further from AGI than people think. I doubt I will live to see it.
I would go far enough as to say that most people alive, if not all, definitely won’t see AGI in their lifetime. That’s of course besides the point, but still…
