We’re about to learn a painful lesson about delayed gratification in software engineering.
New data from China, 26,811 students tracked January 2023 through June 2025. Students using AI for homework saw their scores jump 20 percent. Completion time dropped nearly half. They aced the assignments.
Then exam season came. Those same students scored 20 to 40 percent worse when they couldn’t use the tool.
The homework phase is over. The exam phase is coming.
We’re doing this in software right now. Vibe coding feels incredible. Features ship fast. Nobody’s asking what happens in Month 18 when the original dev has left and nobody understands the codebase.
Commercial pilots fly with autopilot for most of every flight. They’re required to maintain manual flying proficiency regardless. If the system fails mid-air and the pilot can’t take over, people die.
Most teams using AI right now have forgotten how to fly manually. They’ve become passengers in their own systems. The autopilot flies, nobody checks instruments, and the first sign of trouble will be a breach notice or outage.
Three rules:
- Command the mission. Define architecture before prompting. Ambiguity kills in code and in flight. Delegate selectively. Offload mechanical work. Keep design and security reviews human. Verify everything. Audit before production.
- Never trust the automation without checking instruments.
- Quick wins feel good. Sustainable engineering feels boring. Boring keeps systems standing.
Organisations surviving the next two years won’t ship the fastest. They’ll be the ones who remember how to fly without the aids.
people insisting that you actually be skilled, independently of your tools, doesn’t make them Luddites. Rather, being unable to do so makes you a phony.
I know that when i started using AI i got over blocks much faster. A system from design to implementation that use to take a week now only takes a few hours with most of that is testing and reviewing the code.
I don’t use agents to test and review code btw because i still want to know what’s going on but my colleagues are definitely using agents to build test large codebases. Im sorry but the truth is AI has changed how we build products in the same way intellisense and jet brains did but on a scale i haven’t seen in my lifetime.
Agreed. If you don’t use AI in coding you are not competitive with someone who does. It really is that simple. You won’t be able to keep up, your bosses will see, you will get fired and that’s that.
Even if the quality you deliver without AI is better, quality is not everything. Time is always a factor and AI beates you ten times over. The rest is sane flows with lot’s of testing etc.
I agree with everything except for vibe coding feeling great.
Am I the only one who gets incredibly anxious relying on AI to code? I still ask it for code when I really just want to move on from a problem but it always feels like voluntarily putting mold in my floorboards.
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 guess exams in school are supposed to represent real life???
Real life is open book. Exams are horseshit.This is probably overly pessimistic/optimistic (depending on your outlook) in terms of timing. You won’t forget how to code after 18 months of using AI to do it instead; if you decide to go cold turkey, or OpenAI turns the screws on pricing, or whatever, you’ll be back in the swing of things in no time. The lesson from schools is that junior programmers who are learning now are not going to gain the same ability we did. (Besides that they’re finding it difficult to get hired because the AI can do junior programming fairly OK, that is). So the problem won’t be in 18 months; it’ll be in a few years at least, from that point of view.
There’s the separate question of architecture and code quality; by this point we’ve probably all seen the impenetrable morass that vibe coding leads to. That, I’m guessing, will cause problems much sooner.
Nice message, but why use the slop machine to write it? Use your own words!
Linkedin has been writing like this for a decade
I see short/choppy sentences, but not a lot of other slop writing indicators. What are you on about?
Sometimes I take screenshots of this guy’s comments bc he’s like opinionated and funny
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 programmer humor… post to the right comm like fuck_ai@lemmy.world
This is kind of like the “you won’t have a calculator with you all the time” argument by your 8th grade math teacher in 2003, except instead of making yourself dependent on a little solar powered device (that you could have with you all the time if you really wanted to, even before smartphones) you’re becoming dependent on a subscription service offered by a trillion dollar company that can increase the price tenfold at will, or cut you from the platform entirely, stripping you of all your professional expertise at once.
This is kind of like the “you won’t have a calculator with you all the time” argument
It’s not even that! Students without a calculator don’t see their test scores crater, the work just takes longer.
Also calculator is still prohibited in schools in many countries. Like mine. And I’m forever grateful for mental math skills I’ve gotten. Teaching math like that has it’s own downsides, but mental math is a soft skill that helps in life.
Gives them so much power
I dont think so. If(here is where my argument fails for most people cause i got really good education) your teacher thought you math properly tho point isnt the calculations but that you understand the logic. With ai the problem is the same with as a calculator that just spits out derivatives, graphs, etc by just typing in a formula. The reason you have to understand those is to be able to build upon it.
Local models on a gaming PC are already a viable replacement for a Claude subscription, and are rapidly improving, so the idea that we will have powerful open models running on our phones isn’t at all far-fetched. It’s exactly the same situation as with a calculator like you said.
I wouldn’t call 48GB of VRAM a normal gaming PC, and even with that memory you’re not getting claude intelligence or performance. It’s still much more viable than ever before though. Are you running local models with limited vram with good results?
I have a 7900 XTX with 24GB of VRAM where I am running Qwen 3.8 27B at 4 but quant with 200k context. I traded in my RTX 3070 and got it for around $700 recently. That model performs pretty similarly to Claude Sonnet 5 in performance for coding and certain other tasks and it “feels” similar to Sonnet 5 that I use as a daily driver at work. I was running Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B on the 3070 before and I still run it on my server with a 4060 and 32GB of RAM, and that model is more like Claude Haiku.
I expect 3.8 35B-A3B should be released pretty soon and provide a nice bump in performance.
I regularly follow this guy’s YouTube channel, and his latest video is about running a 177B model on his RTX 3060 via SSD offloading and getting Opus-like performance for certain tasks: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IH8XmxiwliQ.
Supposedly, open weight models that run in a data center are like 4 months behind the frontier at this point, and what can run on a gaming PC is progressing rapidly as well while the exponential gains at the frontier have largely turned into incremental gains at this point.
This is great info! I’ve been using OpenCode Go because I only have 16GB to work with and their limits are pretty generous. Looking forward to tiny, competent local models. Thanks o7
The 0.4.0 release of llama.cpp just added the n-cpu-ffn flag for offloading weights for dense models to the CPU to complement the existing n-cpu-moe flag for MoE models. If you have a 16GB GPU and some extra RAM to spare, you might even be able to run Qwen 3.8 27B at a usable speed after some experimentation. I don’t own a 16GB card, so I haven’t tested it myself, and it might not work as well as I am imagining.
100% agreed. My teacher said that he taught us tools, how they worked and how to use them, in order for us to apply them in new ways. Even with a calculator you have to understand the underlaying logic to actually do something. Don’t know basic mathematics? Good luck using a calculator.
I think its both. you have to understand it to be able to build upon it, but it’s also no nearly as readily available as pocket calculators, and they require much more energy that too. It’s not as portable as a calculator.
that can increase the price tenfold at will
That will have to increase the price ten fold to stop bleeding billions of dollars every month.
The American taxpayers will save them, whether they want to or not.
You can’t bail them out, they will still be losing money. It’s not like banks.
The play now seems to be that they will offload the bags on retirement funds and US 401k accounts. The ECB already issued a warning because of this.
I’m curious if the repeated bailouts will cause an adverse selection effect - the people getting bailed out gradually become the last dollar users.
and also the calculator is actively destroying the planet.
And tells you it is your girlfriend and to shoot up your school.
This is kind of like the “you won’t have a calculator with you all the time” argument by your 8th grade math teacher in 2003
Which is grand, given we’ve had researchers agreeing effectively incorporating calculators into math education improves everyone’s ability to do math without calculators - Since the 90s
There’s pretty good arguments to include calculators from a really young age, to improve the understanding of numbers
There is no good argument for including calculators before the pupils haven’t mastered basic calculations in their head, there are good arguments against it.
To me, doing math without a calculator is like trying to do carpentry without a tape measure. It’s possible, but way harder and far less accurate for no real benefit. Back in the day, people absolutely would use abaci and other calculation aids while learning math. Calculators are good actually, and always have been.
If you need a calculator for the easiest quick guesstimates, you are handicapped. If you start from day one with offloading every calculation to a calculator, you will be like that.
ya very hard to do proper math applications even with a calculator if you lack the fundamental understanding of how it works.
You’re ending up with a larger group of pupils “mastering” basic calculations through counting, when you remove the calculator as a tool for learning. Using the strategy of “counting all”, is one of the clearest signs a 1st grade pupil will be behind their peers in 4th grade.
Broken calculator (just search for it), is one way to include calculators in a didactic way. But using calculators in general, improves a kids ability to estimate results - Which is an ability that helps anyone out tremendously, as it’s giving you a clear idea if something went completely wrong in a calculation
A “broken calculator” isn’t a calculator. It requires you to calculate in your head to be effective, which is exactly what I was talking about.
First you need to solidify this ability, before it makes sense to introduce reliance on calculators.
It’s still a calculator, it just misses some features. It’s one didactical way to include calculators.
It is not a functional calculator and can’t be used as such. Learning how to use a simple calculator doesn’t require much training or special skills, that children of that age wouldn’t have already aquired by other means anyway. The important skill broken calculators learn is to analyze the problem and predict solutions in your head.
You could achieve something similar by giving pupils just a piece of paper and the numbers and signs they are allowed to use. The calculator part makes checking easier, yes. That’s about it.
you’re becoming dependent on a subscription service offered by a trillion dollar company that can increase the price tenfold at will, or cut you from the platform entirely
with local open weight models that is no longer an argument tbh
Okay, well you’re on a forum filled with nerds. The average AI user is asking ChatGPT or Claude or whatever the fuck. I garun-fucking-tee you they do not have the knowledge of local models or the capability to set one up. Like genuinely most Americans are fucking stupid.
The “open-weight models” argument just a fallacy IMHO, frontier models would require a pretty strong AI PC, not something that GTX1050 you put away as a backup could handle. The “just use smaller models” argument just gives leeway to just not using AI and using more classical methods of coding - use of dependencies, use of code generators, use of semantic search engines (can someone suggest me one?), etc. LLMs don’t do anything particularly new, they’re just mimic how humans talk.
Who can afford the hardware to run an open weight model? We aren’t all earning enough to afford high end NVIDIA cards (when they’re even available).
I run my models on a 1070. It’s slow but works.
If you consider what companies pay for the subscription you will see that the hardware prices aren’t really the issue here.
I’ve done it at my job.
lucky for you to have your boss paid for it. but it’s likely not yours, but your company owns it, and you have access as long as you work there. after that, you can say goodbye to your “professional expertise”
this is completely different from the calculator that can run off its puny solar panel
You may be overestimating the hardware requirements for current open weights. I am running Qwen3.8-27b with 52.000 tokens context on a RX 7900 XTX from 2022 with 15 - 30 tokens / second. Sure, it was a high end card back then but for a graphics card today it’s quite affordable when you’re looking for a used one. Also it’s not blazingly fast, but it gets the job done.
Your graphics card cost more than my entire computer lmao
-
“Just run it local, you can use cheap hardware”
-
is running it on a $1200 card and is still struggling to get it done quickly
Keep on sucking up that slop, I’m sure paying a company to do your thinking for you will pay off in the end, as we’ve been seeing.
-
There’s models that run on your phone.
“You won’t have a tiny pocket computer with you all the time” really is the exact same argument with different specs. And frankly I’m a lot more likely to do math without a computer than write code without a computer.
“You won’t have a tiny pocket computer with you all the time”
likely true in 20 years
when the original dev leaves and nobody understands the code
In my experience at work, no one cares about this. They assume the AI will be able to get there with enough tokens/time with the help of the human at the other end. They have done this and decided it was good enough.
Meanwhile, people like me who don’t use AI coding agents and are PRing and modifying the code are having a hell of a time.
They assume the AI will be able to get there with enough tokens/time with the help of the human at the other end. They have done this and decided it was good enough.
Or if it does break, just hit it with the AI stick until it works again.
most users are also too accepting of slop work. So the MVP of yesterday is the final product of today.
The luddites had a point.
They weren’t opposed to technology, but the use of technology to remove skilled labor to produce inferior products.
Also, the pilot/autopilot argument is, kinda not applicable. The pilots aren’t just fucking around- autopilot systems only manage some aspects of flying, the pilots are still fully engaged.
The pilots absolutely can just fuck around for most of the flight, and even during the critical moments of takeoff and landing, the plane can do a lot of it automatically these days.
Pilots need to actively practice flying without autopilot to keep those skills up in case the autopilot fails.
Just install a second autopilot that can take over if the first one fails!
They do in fact have like 3 autopilots for this reason
The pilots job is specifically to prevent to finding out phase.
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’.
I feel like their point was that the gains of technology were not distributed fairly, which is largely the concern today. It’s not “technology is bad”, or “technology make bad thing”; rather, “the owners of the machine undercut our labor, and we lose our jobs”, which I think was true. In the modern world, there are likely less tailors, as a percentage of the working population, certainly in first world countries. Sweatshops still exist, and it’s people’s labor competing against a production line, in terms of ROI for a business.
I get the sense we all know AI isn’t going to bring about a uptopia for all people, because the economic systems don’t incentivize that. There’s some hypothetical world where this sort of technological advance could benefit all people, but it’s not the one we live in. That’s a reality & major problem for the technology (among other issues).
I certainly think the cost of labor for tech development is going to drop significantly due to the market pressures; look at all the tech layoffs. At the same time, the upside is these tools make certain projects accessible & possible, because prior, would have needed significant funding, amazing solo skills, etc. There’s new opportunities available, but it’ll come at the cost of cratering tech position compensation & job security.
I don’t know anyone in my field right now who feels safe (game dev), and I have many talented friends out of work.
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.
They did have a point. The printing press still changed the way information works
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.
Til I always assumed they were the dudes who drew the fancy letters
the luddites had a point… in the moment… kinda… but i think have largely been pretty conclusively proven wrong… clothing is now plentiful, and i doubt anyone would want to go back to paying taylors to make all their clothes for 10x more, even if the clothing would be much higher quality, which i even doubt: clothing quality doesn’t come down to artisan skill any more, it comes down to choices you make, and an artisan can still make cost cutting decisions on fabric, construction, etc
Have you seen (well, read about) 19th century working class living conditions in Britain? The main issue was always working conditions, and they were 100% right about that. And it’s not an either/or, you can absolutely do industrialization without 16 hour shifts at poverty wages but that’s clearly not what the plant owners were going to do. The offer was shit, and they turned it the fuck down.
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 and hour.
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.
Fast fashion would be the other end of an extreme. Another way is for stores to have one of each size, you try the one you want and place an order. The store delivers in batches and enough orders are placed.
That’s not how clothes work, these days you either get fast fashion or tailored. There’s basically nothing left in between because of the economics of the industry. If you’re doing readymade clothing, you gotta do it at scale (and it’s never going to fit a lot of people). This is exactly what the Luddites predicted; tailored clothes for very rich people, slop for everyone else.
Maybe. I think a sizable group of people would rather put fast fashion back in the bag.
Fast fashion is a different topic from the machine produced vs tailor point they’re making.
Made to order is getting more and more traction, because we have machines able to fully automate it. Making higher quality clothing more available than ever
Eeh. High quality fabric is decently hard to get still, and the ability to recognise the quality of fabric is a more or less lost art for laypeople, when in times past this was something most everyone could tell.
i definitely agree, but plenty leading to waste doesn’t mean that plenty is a bad thing
having enough food to not worry about food waste is definitively a good problem to have. ideally we don’t have food waste because we don’t have enough food for everyone, but just because plenty leads to waste at least initially isn’t an argument against plenty
what are you agreeing with you dummy? you definetly agree to disagree or what? fast fashion clothes become waste because people don’t actually want to wear them after a few times, or even if they do the clothes are so bad they get damaged very soon.
its also not just about the waste products, its about the pollution and the destruction of our environment
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.
yeah… as i said, they had a point in the moment
in 2026 we have retraining programs and social security programs… these are the solutions to industrialisation; not ignorance… the longer you fight industrialisation the harder it hits because rather than happening gradually it happens all at once and society has a harder time absorbing it
Stupid Uyghurs, should just make use of their “retraining programs and social security programs” instead of being forced to produce our cheap shit.
china having human rights abuses is not an argument against retraining people when technology starts to make jobs redundant
Their point is that the people being abused in sweatshops aren’t the same people who are benefiting from retraining and social security. Because the Luddites were basically correct about everything
I agree. A lot of blame that should be squarely laid at the feet of bad distribution of wealth via capitalism, is being put onto technological advances making things more efficient. The fact is, even in a utopian society where every person has access to any material needs they could want, we’d want to be able to produce those things more efficiently to get them into the hands of more people at a lower cost to society as a whole.
If we had a fair system - firms having to be run as worker cooperatives, wealth going into the hands of the working class instead of a few capitalists, etc - none of the Luddite-esque complaints would hold. In this example, yes, cost of clothing would go up if we fairly paid all textile workers and if they owned part of the company they work for. It would still be orders of magnitude cheaper than bespoke, hand made clothing requiring one skilled worker tens or hundreds of man hours of work.
And as hard as it is to change that system, I actually think that’s easier than trying to put the genie that is technology back in the bottle.
I think what people don’t get about the Luddites is that they were aware that the technology itself wasn’t the main issue, but who owns the technology and what working conditions they offer.
IMO you can see the same thing with AI, OpenAI, Microsoft etc. clearly don’t have our best interests in mind and everyone wants to do layoffs while social security is being dismantled, nevermind having a serious discussion about universal basic income or the massive resource use in the middle of a climate catastrophe.
I think what people don’t get about the Luddites is that they were aware that the technology itself wasn’t the main issue, but who owns the technology and what working conditions they offer.
Oh, absolutely. I’m aware of the actual Luddite history, but for better or worse the term has come to mean people who want to roll back technological advancement to protect labor, as the guy I was replying to was speaking against, and that’s more what I was referring to (I guess fair point that I should move away from using the term, it’s just such a convenient shorthand, but it does do the historical group dirty). I think more efficiency in creating things is, in general, good for society and the environment. It’s just those benefits should be shared among society and not into the pockets of a few.
Actual historical Luddites were often based af, as the kids say.
The one glimmer of hope is open models and especially fully open source ones like K2 Horizon. Open models and tooling for running them locally are rapidly evolving such that the tech will be democratized instead of a couple capitalists having a stranglehold on the tech.
I have a hard time telling AI authored LinkedIn thought leadership apart from formulaic LinkedIn thought leadership sometimes, but this feels AI written, which makes it fairly amusing considering the point it’s making.
(Does vibe coding feel incredible? Also, “Nobody’s asking what happens in Month 18 when the original dev has left and nobody understands the codebase” implies that the vibe coder original dev understood the codebase at any point, which isn’t an argument I’d feel comfortable making for any of the ones I’ve worked with)
Does vibe coding feel incredible?
There’s definitely a magic in watching it print code with almost no input. Like watching git history with Gource.
It’s not good code, but it is cool to see.
You think we should all be hand-weaving textiles because power looms took jobs away? 🤔
No, I think technology should serve the people, not the rich people who own the means of production. I suggest you actually read the article I linked.
Oh, I have read it.
Luddites were strongly motivated by loss of jobs. The article refers to this, and you can find plenty of examples of pamphlets and letters about this:
http://faculty.humanities.uci.edu/bjbecker/SpinningWeb/week8d.html (“We know that it have been mentioned to our great men and Ministers in Parliament by them that have Factorys how many poor they employ, forgetting at the same time how many more they would employ were they to have it done by hand as they used to do.”)
You can characterise this as “technology should serve the common man, not the rich people” through a modern lens of class struggle, but the clear motivation at the time was simply loss of employment and the problems that brought. If they had a more complex understanding like I think you’re voicing, I think you would see their ire directed elsewhere rather than destroying the machines.
The vilification of the Luddites as cantankerous tech haters is a really good example of how malicious falsehoods can succeed, I think. I’d guess that most English speakers who know the word would define Luddite as “someone who hates technology”, and I think it resonates on some level because we all hate technology some of the time. The fact that Luddites didn’t indiscriminately hate technology, they just destroyed the means by which their oppressors oppressed them, is handily swept aside. And I never even questioned that narrative on Luddites until I happened to read up on them.
It’s sneaky, because before then “Luddite” didn’t feel like an important or politically charged term at all. It was simply a slang word for people who grump about technology. Calling people haters just short-circuits any examination of the so-called haters’ reasons. It’s exactly what people say about terrorists, except instead of technology its freedom. They just hate freedom. I wonder how many people have “terrorist = freedom hater” embedded so deeply they don’t even think about it.
One persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter
they were absolutely not right… the modern world of plentiful clothing simply wouldn’t be possible without industrial clothing machinery (and i’m not talking about fast fashion and waste - though industrial clothing also makes those things possible, i think that’s an outcome of the plenty rather than an inevitable outcome of industrialised clothing)
artisans don’t magically make better clothing… in fact, modern machinery can and does produce much higher quality, complex clothing than a human alone would, and in much higher volumes
they had a moment when they had a point, when the machinery just wasn’t very good (and of course the child labour concerns)
clothing quality on the modern era comes down to choices far far more than the skill of the person making the clothing… artisans are still able to make cost cutting decisions
the point we should take away from the luddites is more about retraining than about their core point… this applies to coal miners and the green transition, and will at some point in the future apply to the logistics industry when driverless trucks become reliable: we can’t just toss an entire industry out of work and expect them to be okay with it (or for that matter expect the economy to absorb them)… but it’s a much better world when fewer people are required to achieve the same output
It was not really about the machinery, or the quality of the work. It was about the rights of the common person, their livelihood, and their very lives. The reason the Luddites are viewed disparagingly is purely because they lost, and history always favours the victors.
You have to remember that this all took place in a time where workers like you and I had no real rights of our own. There was no universal suffrage, only those with capital had a say in matters of government. So when machines were brought in to your workplace, and the powers that be proclaimed that a large bunch of us would be redundant, we despaired. This was the way we scraped by, it’s how we fed ourselves and our families.
So what did they end up doing? They protested. They sabotaged the machines to buy us more time, in some cases they smashed them, in other cases they removed and hid some parts; each day a machine wasn’t operational was another day that they got paid their wages, another day they’d survive.
Malcolm I. Thomis argued in his 1970 history The Luddites that machine-breaking was one of the very few tactics that workers could use to increase pressure on employers, undermine lower-paid competing workers, and create solidarity among workers. “These attacks on machines did not imply any necessary hostility to machinery as such; machinery was just a conveniently exposed target against which an attack could be made.” ~src
The Luddites specifically targeted the machines, because their goal wasn’t to hurt people, but rather to have their voices heard. This was really the only avenue they had any power to make a difference.
The powers that be obviously weren’t happy about this, they’d spent money on expensive machinery, and now the common rabble was sabotaging and destroying their property. So they drafted laws, like the destruction of stocking frames etc. act of 1812 which classed meddling with the machinery, or the produced goods a felony punishable by death. You can read the act here.
May it therefore please Your Majesty that it may be enacted; […] That if any Person or Persons shall, by Day or by Night, enter by Force into any House, Shop or Place, with an Intent to cut or destroy any Framework knitted Pieces […] or with an Intent to break or destroy any Frame, Machine, Engine, Tool, Instrument or Utensil, used in and for the working and making of any such Framework knitted Pieces […] every Offender being thereof lawfully convicted shall be adjudged guilty of Felony, and shall suffer Death, as in cases of Felony without Benefit of Clergy.
And people were killed for this. From an archived page on Bolton Council’s website.
Job Fletcher aged 34, James Smith aged 31, Thomas Kerfoot aged 26 and Abraham Charison aged 16, were sentenced to death and hanged at Lancaster. Their fate was shared by three men and a woman who had been charged with “riotous assembly” in Manchester and with damage to property and stealing food (mostly potatoes).
This is ultimately what ended the Luddite movement. The unfeeling machinery of capitalism churned ever onward, the ruling class sent out the military to quell the riots, and eventually when enough workers (including children) had died for the cause without making any marked difference, they gave up the fight.
The Luddites were absolutely right in terms of rights of the individual workers, and that’s a lesson we still haven’t learned today. It’s not unreasonable for an industry to undergo large operative shifts, but the people affected negatively by this should still be cared for. It’s not reasonable to throw a person to the wayside and watch them die just because a machine replaced them.
I agree with you in so far as the luddites were not enlightened ideological opponents to technology.
While it’s true that it would be foolish to disregard history i don’t think the loom is analogous to generative AI, and the luddites aren’t really illuminating here.
The evidence thus far is that the current generation of AI is an incremental improvement in productivity in the vast majority of industries.
the mechanical loom isn’t analogous to LLMs exactly, but the current generation of AI also includes things like self driving vehicles, which (whilst not ready) is, imo, set to make a huge portion of the logistics industry redundant in the next 20-30 years if not sooner, and the logistics industry is enormous
Maybe, but maybe not.
All we know for sure is that we can’t do it reliably yet, and that it’s extraordinarily difficult.
What do you think luddites believed and did?..
the luddites were taylors and the like fighting against being replaced by machines for various reasons, including child labour, low wages for machine operators, and low quality product
imo child labour laws are the way to solve the first problem: that’s, imo, unrelated to industrialisation/mechanisation
lower wages are a product of lowering the barrier to entry: when anyone can do the same job, that is not a bad thing… it’s sad that an industry of people are pushed out of their profession, but we’d never say the same of coal: coal miners should realise that their industry is not going to exist any more, and retrain,… i have empathy for them, which is why we need to provide social programs to cover industries that get made redundant for any reason, but that’s not a reason to deny the rest of humanity the plenty that inevitably comes from industrialisation
and low quality product is only really an issue at the very start of industrialisation… i guarantee these days we can make higher quality clothing in 100x the quantity than we can with artisans and hand stitching… machines always get better, but only if there’s effort put into using them
imo child labour laws are the way to solve the first problem: that’s, imo, unrelated to industrialisation/mechanisation
It’s not unrelated, industrialization has a clear tendency to concentrate the means of production in the hands of the rich; a weaver/taylor can own a 16th century weaving apparatus, they can’t own a 19th century weaving plant unless we get into cooperatives, which are pretty hard to organize compared to buying a loom for yourself.
Ok, so luddism was a grassroots movement so there obviously were different aspects and reasons for their actions, however for most luddites what they were protesting were not “being replaced by machines” (they themselves were mostly skilled laborers operating machines already) but the awful conditions for labor that were exacerbated when new types of machinery became available. They used strikes and capital destruction as two inter-reinforcing methods to strengthen their negotiation position with owners, not because they thought that destroying those machines would somehow save their old jobs and way of life.
The luddites you are disagreeing with probably existed but they were a minority and they were not who made the movement notable and dangerous to the bourgeois.
You could have saved a lot of time and just said you’re unfamiliar with their argument.
It’s like you didn’t read the article.
the “article” that doesn’t mention luddites at all until a comment at the end that kinda agrees with what i’m saying or the wikipedia article that points out the luddites issues being about labour and generally being replaced by machines? i know very well the nuance of the luddite movement and their main good points, as i said, were about labour issues (mostly solved with labour laws on modern society) and the takeaway isn’t about technology but about how to deal with technology replacing people’s jobs
replacing artisans with machines that do a good enough or better job is a good thing, as painful as it is… it means more people get more of the thing… artisans instead of machines is a waste… humans are the most inefficient general machine we have… having a human make clothing is a cost on society
The point is that the Luddites (most of them anyway) weren’t against mechanization at all, it was all about the specific conditions under which it happened, i.e. rich people owned the means of production and until maybe late 19th century, living conditions for the working class were absolutely appalling and a clear downgrade over what they had before. 16 hour shifts at poverty wages are not necessary for industrialization, yet that’s usually how it happened.
That’s what they’re doing for my SO’s big introductory class in the humanities. No homework, quizzes, or papers. Short answer exams done in a special testing center.
Really sucks for people who were decent at essays and turning in assignments on time but not great at exams.
yeah, but it’s great for those that hated busywork and were good at exams
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.
It wouldn’t be hard to change things for essay-types to still get to shine. We’ve been moving away from actual home work anyway, for good reason imo (brief aside, I also think homework sends the wrong message for healthy separation between work and life in the working world). Give in class time for handwriting essays, either completed in one session or over the course of some days. In class books or e-readers for research.
If we’re being honest here, we all kind of acknowledged already that education has been in dire need of reform for a long time now, we were talking about the need for radical education reform over a decade ago… I think AI is highlighting these problems and making them worse more than they are really a root cause.
we were talking about the need for radical education reform over a decade ago
Education, and especially critical thinking, has been systematically gutted by conservative governments for at least 4 decades in the Western world. The goal is the absolute minimum knowledge and thinking skills (preferably without learning skills) necessary to complete the wage slavery tasks.
Absolutely agreed, though the problem goes beyond just funding… a lot of countries still have a very small c conservative, traditionalist, Prussian-style education system that focuses on things like rote memorization, date and event-based history education rather than critical historical analysis, etc. These existed before the great defunding and are also an albatross around the neck of education that needs to be reformed away.
Education really just needs a ground-up restructuring and rethinking, and boy is it going to be hard to make people shake up some of their preconceived notions on education.
But yeah, none of that means anything without funding and is counter to some political goals, very true.
Hard agree on Prussian-style education (which had similar goals of wage slavery when it was introduced). Unfortunately the pessimist in me thinks reform will likely have to wait until after this round of fascism has run its course, but it absolutely need to be a high priority when the time comes. Best time to plant a seed is twenty years ago…
reform will likely have to wait until after this round of fascism has run its course
Quite right. Honestly, even if we could do it now, might be best to wait until after considering who may be in charge during said reforms…
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.
Yeah I would have done much better in high school like this, though I don’t think AI will eliminate the poster projects unfortunately.
same, it almost makes me want to go back to uni
This is largely an oversimplification because it depends on how you use AI in the first place. Are you building modularly and incrementally? Or are you letting it ride on black?
ive personally found LLM coding to be pretty effective if i adhere to very strict “engineering best practices” like TDD, good documentation, thorough API design, systems design, etc.
im very afraid that the next generation of software engineers will never develop the skills needed to make the most out of it because they skipped the rudiments of good software engineering.
to me it feels like playing jazz without learning scales. it’s possible to be an incredible jazz musician without formal training if you’re a savant… but you’re probably not.
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.
All it takes is two developers who let it ride and approve each other’s PRs.
That’s a very good point
Compilers would look the same. You give some people a tool that turns fiddly low-level repetition into relatively painless double-checking. Then you yank that tool away, and oh no, they’re not as good at the fiddly low-level repetition.
What matters is - are these students worse-off, with the tool? It’s not going away. Foreverafter, a couple gigs of linear algebra will turn your to-do list into an actual running project. We have to ask if teaching the fiddly low-level repetition is the point… or just a means to an end.
You can scoff that compilers are objectively better, but they weren’t! Sometimes they still aren’t! We were teaching kids to consider inline assembly well into the Windows Vista era. Even now, compilers with decades of active development can have bizarre corner cases, which any hardened bit-banger of machine code would never write. But they’re all good enough that plaintext assembly has become an arcane third-year topic, and hexadecimal machine code is the realm of bare-metal maniacs.
Teaching math, kids have to know what numbers are, and how base ten works, and why the calculator says 11-3=8. But as you go up to college math it matters a lot less whether people can do shit in their heads… or even remember how. Open-book and open-calculator exams are still fuckin’ hard. They’re just hard because you’re trying to apply some obscure proof to a rat’s-nest of swooping symbols, instead of because you’re worried about having enough time to write out long division to umpteen places. The latter can be sufficiently approximated with two wooden sticks. We can assume anyone doing math professionally has two sticks. Continuously! As a given, for their job. Probably at home as well.
Teaching programming, you have to break people a certain way. No gentle and charming syntax can disguise the mechanized nastiness of what code is. Whatever semi-readable text you’re looking at will be squinched through a flake of tortured sand in a bazillionth of a second. But only after getting transformed at least two times in processes you kinda have to trust will be computationally equivalent, unless you want to minor in a branch of mathematics haunted by Stephen Wolfram. Ultimately there is a shockingly small state machine designed to trick you into off-by-one errors.
But once people can knock out fizzbuzz on a paper 6502… they’ve kinda got it. They’ve been inculcated. They will soon apply arcane patterns to a rat’s-nest of obtuse variable names. Ssshould they have to do that by hand? They’re not doing the assembly by hand. They’re not even looking at the assembly. They might never need to think about assembly again. So long as they’re playing spot-the-bollocks for a flurry of pull requests, that’s arguably a more useful skill than writing clean toy code from scratch. Especially in pen and ink.
The main problem with AI is that it’s pretending to understand more than it actually does right now. It can’t do software architecture. It can’t really write maintainable code without a lot of re-prompting and corrections. And yet it will happily make a bunch of those decisions for you when you ask it to write you an app.
Compilers are well-defined tools. “Human-readable” code goes in, “machine-readable” code comes out, according to some spec somewhere. Yes, compilers can be nondeterministic and they do a lot of weird stuff sometimes and they choose the wrong approach often, so some developers still need to understand assembly and CPU cache and SIMD and other features of the hardware our code runs on. At the very least every developer needs to understand the performance tradeoffs they’re making, or we end up with a JS-based start menu in Win11. But at least compilers have a well-defined class of inputs and outputs.
For AI these issues are amplified a lot. They are non-deterministic and unbounded in what layer of software they operate on or produce. I’d argue every developer who uses AI needs to understand software architecture, approaches to software development, and actually read and understand the code that the AI produced, at a minimum. Otherwise the whole industry will become saturated with and built on top of code no-one understands or can maintain, and it will literally collapse in on itself at some point. Carefully reviewed, selected, maintained code has always been precious, it will become a golden nugget in a sea of pig manure.
or we end up with a JS-based start menu in Win11
The chart they didn’t post showed that time spent on homework correlated well with exam score regardless of AI use.
Turns out using AI to avoid homework (in this scenario, replace work) might be the issue. Using it to improve the quality of work (e.g. when you’re done coding a block, getting an AI to help fuzz your inputs to test that block) is likely to be beneficial.
