Explanations appreciated.
Personally, I'd have to say, No.
I know there will be a few people to disagree with this (some already have), and honestly, it's a complete shot in the dark so I'm willing to be wrong (I welcome being wrong). I just see/hear so many people on one side, and I think tempering our optimism might serve us well.
There's been a marginal improvement in how I can perform my job, but I still clock in and out at the same time. I'd be willing to bet, it more often it makes more work (longer emails from incompetent managers, false perceptions of competence, more review etc.)
Perhaps, if everyone makes even marginal improvements in their efficiency, then it might make a meaningful impact on human productivity. The challenge is, as it always is, in harnessing this toward significant and meaningful ends.
AI has improved my working life as someone who didn’t have a background in CS, but I want to mention something I always see when anyone brings it up
When devs say AI is slop, they're evaluating it against their years of learning code from scratch
When noobs say AI is amazing they're measuring it against pre AI, which was not being able to build anything at all
Those are two very different starting points
The critique that noobs can't review the code misses this distinction
The question isn't whether an amateur with AI is as capable as a senior dev
The question is whether a noob with AI is more capable than the same noob without AI
The answer is obviously yes
Interesting point. Would you use software from a noob to manage your money? Your privacy?
Would I trust a noob with my sats or privacy? No
but I also wouldn't have trusted that same noob before AI
id say the question is whether AI makes them more able than before, clearly it does
The fact that they're still not a full stack dev doesn't change that
How can you tell if an author is "capable enough"?
You don't need to know in advance who's 'capable enough'
I never said that AI makes everyone a fullstack dev
I said that AI makes noobs more capable than they were before
Those are two different arguments
It removes barriers, we agree on that. Capability is a big word though as it depends on the specifics of the goal you're trying to achieve. If we're talking nothing-at-stake, zero-requirements throwaway stuff, then yes, everyone is super capable now. Has been since GPT-2.
I know because I helped a fair share of those "noobs" by completely rewriting the GPT generated prototype code to their ideas into productized software. Back then, not a single line survived. Nowadays, maybe some lines will survive. But more often than not, even the boilerplate is poor.
That's fair, and you've obviously cut your teeth by doing the hard work of turning slop into real software
I just think AI is increasing what noobs can accomplish, remembering that only pro's like yourself can confidently present a project to a paying customer with assurance of reliability
I'm not worried about paid projects. If you mess those up and your customer is half-competent, you'll pay for your own fuckups. Damage clauses are no joke.
In a professional setting, I'm much more worried about FOSS, and specifically, open source libraries that are adapted into everyone's apps by LLMs (also for those paid projects.) Not only is it a cesspool of vulnerability in the delivery mechanism (all those npm malware infections of late) but underlying libraries that were once carefully crafted are now getting sloppy. A minor update can fuck you up. If you don't know what you're doing, you don't know to even ask the bot to assess your dependency.
Now, if anyone vibe-codes something for themselves that solves a problem they have, I have no issues with that at all. I encourage that. But everyone wants to be famous now from the work of an LLM that itself has no fucking clue (because it is not some sentient being, despite what the CEOs claim.) Thus, the slop gets published and marketed. And when you become a user of said product because everyone and their dog was telling you on X and nostr (and SN!) how fucking awesome this new app is, you're at risk too. And if 99% of devs don't check before they install, think about which users are going to get rekt: all of 'em.
Improvement is a relative and subjective thing, so it will be different for everyone. I think I'm a little better than break-even overall, but it's negligible in the big picture right now. New problems have come that require new solutions, I'll give the worst example from real life.
For years I have been reviewing the code I run on my "batphone". I was losing this battle, especially by mid 2024. For example, I didn't have email on that phone (I still don't, but by choice) because every time I was halfway reviewing the Proton mail app they released new code - I was continuously behind. I could barely review Signal within their cycle. The asymmetry of a bunch of teams pushing out code versus a solo reviewer was slowly eating up all my time, also because making sense of code snippets consumes a lot of energy. I ended up spending 4 days a week on security review alone, just to review OS changes and 5 apps. I was losing track of what I had and hadn't reviewed, making a mess of my reviews. It was a never ending downward spiral and spending time on process improvements meant potentially falling behind on important security updates.
It got worse through 2025 as some apps and more importantly, the underlying libraries they are a composite of, started to be vibe coded. The review pressure did a 4x or so (and I started seeing more and more problematic things.) So something had to change: either I give up knowing what code I run or I find a more efficient way to do the reviews. I could hardly reduce apps further and I was getting more and more worried about my day-to-day phone based on what I was seeing. I needed to increase scope, not decrease.
This is when I decided I must try to "fight fire with fire". I just had to make sure I have superior fire: faster and more precise than the fire I'm fighting. Luckily for me, most people that call themselves devs don't care one bit about quality. And precision is intensive when using LLMs, especially if you're too lazy to read the results - you cannot vibe review, it's retarded to do so because the (post-)training data is too poisoned by lazy and retarded people operating on "good enough" for it to be reliable.
So, I went about describing how I do security review for software and build that out to make specific instructions for each app, a generic framework that detects new releases and new or changed dependencies, and tooling, tons and tons of tooling, because everything that can be done deterministically, should not be done by an LLM. I have this now and I have been able to expand the scope to my non-batphone. I also no longer spend more than 8 hours a week on review, except when there are some completely insane changes.
The process I sovereignly have is about the same as what socket security does, except I have 10x the depth, 20x the precision, -10x the false positives (and I know about them early) and nothing a bot says will ever be published to anyone except to me so I don't add to the global accumulation of slop on the internet. I don't get a final report, only intermediate results. Sometimes I find something worth proposing a fix for, but devs have gotten so insensitive to input due to all the bots that both roam GitHub and that they choose to interact with, that it takes forever to get even low hanging fruit acknowledged, let alone merged. So I am no longer spending the effort to send people high quality pull requests. I don't send them any pull requests; I just either remove the code, or I fix my fork and give the world the finger, because no one cares about quality anymore.
As of mid 2026, nearly everyone, including the main LLM labs, is hyper-focused on the act of shipping and is using LLMs to do it. It's hard to find a dev that truly cares about quality nowadays: everything is "good enough" by a very, very low bar. Coding LLMs made this possible to even the biggest retards now through vibe coding but I've seen formerly smart people become retarded now that they can be lazy. It's the direct enshittification of software and most of all FOSS, because that doesn't make many people money.
For commercial products, maybe a better word would be
Theranosification. Faking till making. It's all around us in densities never seen before. And most of the time, software devs don't even understand that the shit they pitch is completely fucked, because they didn't read the slop they published, let alone understand it, and then you get some asshole pitching their slop as if it is the newest bestest thing to ever been made. They couldn't be further off the truth.Can LLMs make things better? Yes.
Will you work less? No.
You will work harder and solve more difficult challenges.
Isn't meaningful also subjective and qualitative?
I used ChatGPT to help me decipher the first 18 lines of Canterbury Tales:
What that Aprille with his shoures soote,
Naturally, yes.
The droght of March hath perced to the roote
I love Middle English!
I appreciate the detailed testimony. You know, I have followed along on your clanker crusades for a little bit now, getting sparse detailes here and there, and I could sense that the vibing scene has amassed huge amounts of bad quality code output that make competent the jobs of competent people (such as you are) harder. There's a shadow of this on the meat space cronyism that I'm more familiar with, which is, as I alluded to above, a false sense of competency. Bad logos, wall-art, signage etc. is everywhere because now everyone thinks real graphic design is obselete. Badly thought out emails with way too much text are sent more often. On net, we get lower quality ....everywhere. And increasingly, fewer and fewer people seem to notice or care.
If compute stopped being so heavily subsidized, and the cost of using it were higher, then my guess is the more meaningful applications would become more apparent.
I'm mostly crusading against the endless stream of bullshit.
Yes. And it's tricky to spot for the human eye, but also for vanilla bots. For example, you ask Claude to do a full security review on some vibed crap it will tell you it's great - some minor issues (it will literally flag shit as minor.) But if you actually spec out a quality expectation (that is not even too crazy, like things you would put in a definition of done in a regular commercial software business and that's already super-low-bar) then suddenly there are more issues than the bot is trained to enumerate (really annoying thing they taught these bots to do: limit lists of issues.)
I guess that depends on who you ask, I'm generally synonymous with rectal pain, lol.
This is exactly the bullshit I'm seeing all around me and it comes directly from the labs pumping their own bags. All the US labs do it and people believe it - even overseas people - because they are dependent on some sociopath giving them hope. It bothers me deeply and endlessly how vulnerable humanity is to bullshit. This is the real issue. LLMs are just tools - poorly developed tools but it's early days - the people blindly repeating false narratives thought up by greedy folks is what makes it dangerous. Very dangerous.
It'll end only when inflation and salaries catch up to the insane valuations of startups we see, or the hype dies. Not counting SpaceX because that is a conglomerate so it's hard to estimate which of its products will hold, but let's see what happens post-IPO with Anthropic and OpenAI. If these hold the valuations ascribed to them now, subsidized compute will end when overall salaries did a 10x and you pay $50 for a dozen eggs. Then we'll also see if Bitcoin truly is an inflation hedge.
We'll have to see. I do know that there is still good stuff out there, and effort is not gone. It does sadden me to see some formerly okay-ish products become unusable. Especially in nostr this is now prominent, which sucks.
Has the power drill meaningfully improved your life?
Let's consider this question from several points-of-view.
Might say "no". Maybe he's used the power drill a few times to solve personal problems but hasn't realized he can also use it to fundamentally change his business. He still hires 12 laborers to turn screwdrivers and thinks its silly to charge batteries and run power cords everywhere.
Might say "no". Because he enjoyed the wrist training of turning a screwdriver all day. The soullessness of pointing a power tool at the problem makes him feel empty at his job.
Might say "yes". Because the power drill let's them build 2x more things that people continue to value highly even tho his costs have fallen.
Might say "no". The screwdriver wasn't valuable before, and the "more powerful" screwdriver isn't suddenly valuable to them now.
Might say "yes". The crafts they already value are easier to make, they still value them, but now they're abundant. They might even become a craftsman themselves because they feel empowered to create their own utility rather than pay for someone else to make it.
Might say "no". Because they valued the labor of the craftsman, not the thing itself. The power drill is diminishing the value because the craftsman isn't sweating as much.
Notice how most of these segments don't see meaningful improvement from their PoV. But in hindsight, I think it's obvious that power tools have meaningfully improved our lives.
the irony here is that I am asking exactly that!--how it changes things for individuals--since it is clearly a subjective thing, but...
is so redundant and impersonal it has to be AI.
Such an intellegent response, it must be artificial
Thanks for the compliment : )
Your answer just made clear what was implied by my asking.
That seems like a low bar for intelligence, but have it your way!
Our computer engineers are 4x more productive. Offshore resources are toast. AI is cheaper and better quality
Great! Are they compensated better now?
not a chance!
I mostly use it when doing research and I'd say it is a lot faster than google search for finding things.
I often know where I want to look, but it's very good at finding things that I didn't know to look for.
I think that's a meaningful advancement.
In your case, would you say it leads to higher quality of thoughts, a higher quantity or both?
you should use brave or duckduckgo or startpage but never google
No.
If anything, it's made my job harder given that my value add has shrunk dramatically (= distance between what I can do professionally and what AI can do faster and for almost no money)
Being technologically made obsolete is pretty shit all things considered
Are you talking about editing or writing?
I personally think there is hope on the writing side. Maybe just based on vibes. It has always been hard to make lucrative go at it, and yet some folks have. I don't have much interest in reading AI generated content, but I might be a dying breed of people who read just for enjoyment.
@Darthcoin is an NSA agent infiltrator.
Do not be fooled by his blatant virtue signalling hypocrisy...it's a trap.
He doesn't even use Bitcoin here on SNs because his NSA handler banned him from doing so.
Improved yes but meaningful I would say no.
Then again I am not an AI power user. I use it to fix my terrible writing skills but for the most part the improvements have been marginal.
Plus I haven’t dove in 100% due to the privacy concerns. I am already cucked to the government, Apple, Google, do I need another platform knowing everything about me?
I'm a terrible and slow writer as well and ChatGPT has paid off in spades for me
From insurance company lawyers to state tax auditors, it has been efficacious.
I even met with my CPA friend, showed him a draft and he said this is better than you would get from a tax defense lawyer
My CPA was hot garbage. My lawyer was slightly better.
Fair answer. Does it give you insights about how you can write better?
My use cases are mostly just slight improvements in convenience or expedience.
I suspect I'll start using it for more substantial projects in the near future, though.
I constantly feel this way, and then never do! Haha. Hopefully you will post about it.
If it happens, I will definitely post about it.
I don’t think there is a universal right or wrong answer, only an answer that fits your particular situation.
My context is that I am an overworked public school teacher whose overwhelming array of responsibilities ironically leaves me with little time to do the job I have signed up for: teach. Sensei is by no means lazy or fatalistic though. This is what I came up with after I realised that I needed to come up with some study material of sorts for my charges to consolidate their learning:
This June school holiday, I discovered that ChatGPT had enhanced its image generation capabilities by leaps and bounds. Colourful images, no mistakes, efficient than my painstaking process. This is what I can churn out with, provided that I have complied my target material:
So now I feel that I’m not shortchanging my students in spite of my legitimate reasons not to center them amid my work life. But have I stolen more time to pursue my hobbies? Not really. I am working hard this holiday because I now realise the immense potential of AI, so my expectations of myself have increased accordingly. Not to mention that ChatGPT only allows for 3-4 free images every other day, so I cannot really release my foothold on the accelerator haha.
I think AI has made my life more fun lar
Teachers are terribly overworked and most probably benefit by having a computer slave take care of the menial stuff.
Does it yeild better and/or more results than a teacher in training could?
I'm mostly interested in challenging the idea that it has been/will be world changing. I'm not seeing it yet. Most likely it is my own deficiency in imagination.
speaking from my personal experience and through the lens of my students,
I think AI can produce better results. if we are talking about national exams, I know the answers but sometimes find it hard pressed to express them to my students because I don’t have the words to articulate my thought processes. I just know. this is in regard to the nuances between synonyms and rationale behind choice of a particular grammar rule. I lean on AI that way.
I see AI like how a calculator aids us in doing Maths. I don’t think it will be world changing too. I used it quite extensively to ask it to critique my creative writing but has since stopped because I don’t want to be bound to its formulaic ways. My writing may be sprinkled with warts and all, but hey they articulate my thoughts in my own original idiosyncratic way. And I think that’s what AI can never replicate
Meaningfully no. But it has been useful.
Sorta kinda yes but...
I play with it in terms of vibe coding, I find it very useful for giving me a quick price point analysis for ecommerce stuff, I throw around project ideas to get a basic view of what might be needed to make an idea happen, and I use it for converting PDFs of spreadsheets, data or writing into usable analysis. All of them basically just save me time so instead of spending 5 hours on something, I get the result in 10 minutes or less. That's valuable to me. But it also involves a very good idea what I'm after, and I have a background knowledge to immediately see BS and not use it.
I do not know however AI articles is violation of term of services on PTP platforms the only place is your own blog or forum to publish them because no one could punish you there unlike SN or tangled or similar platforms or vocal media