It’s a sort of classic Internet, spicy hot take, grenade in the hole rant (old Usenet heads will recognize the type), but there’s a lot in Thomas Ptacek’s My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts that had me nodding my head. And I’m not even an AI hipster. (Although a bit of fly.io fanboy)
Tech execs are mandating LLM adoption. That’s bad strategy. But I get where they’re coming from.
Some of the smartest people I know share a bone-deep belief that AI is a fad — the next iteration of NFT mania. I’ve been reluctant to push back on them, because, well, they’re smarter than me. But their arguments are unserious, and worth confronting. Extraordinarily talented people are doing work that LLMs already do better, out of spite.
All progress on LLMs could halt today, and LLMs would remain the 2nd most important thing to happen over the course of my career.
Ptacek has the bona fides to back this up. To be sure, his focus is on coding and software development assistance, but that’s why I nodded my head so much. Can’t claim jumping in with both feet, doing a ton of vibe coding, and deploying to prod with my co-pilot. However, my gut tells me this change is on the order of impact that compilers had on programming. In 3-5 years we’ll be going, “did we really do it that way?”.
YMMV.
P.S. When I grow up, I want to write like Thomas Ptacek