wrote a blog about "craft software" and slop (not necessarily the ai kind) what if end user programming is our only out? https://ezhik.jp/ai-slop-terrifies-me/

I'm terrified that our craft will die, and nobody will even care to mourn it.

I agree with Tudor and this sentence. I enjoy software as a craft, but moments like these are revelatory because they always reveal what we as a whole actually value. It's possible that an increase in slop will increase the value of crafted, intentional experiences (not just even in software, but in general) but I'm not sure I'm optimistic. Really, I'm more curious where this takes us as a species. When we outsource everything and care diminishes, what's left? Do we move to bigger and better concerns? Or do we atrophy? At what point do we become a species left with a bunch of opaque magical artifacts that we don't understand?

Certainly, I'm in a place now where if I'm going to hand-code something, those lines of code will be works of art worth reading on their own merit, no point otherwise.

If you look at how automation was introduced in the past, in particular the development of industry, it has always lead to some equilibrium in which both automation and manual work found stable places of co-existence. We still have carpenters, but they don't make their own nails any more. What worries me about AI and in particular LLMs is the way it is forced on society in a kind of blitzkrieg. If people could evaluate and adopt it at their own pace, we'd be much better off collectively.

If people could evaluate and adopt it at their own pace, we'd be much better off collectively.

Well said. Unfortunately I think that rarely happens with technology 😭

It's what has happened with technology for many centuries. The concentration of power in tech that allows starting a blitzkrieg is very recent.

How much of that is due to lack of regulatory oversight and concentration of power vs… it just being easier to deploy technologies? I mean, you can beam the technology straight into people’s pockets. Accessibility to new technologies is drastically greater.

I suppose that the two causes you cite are not independent. If it's easy to beam technology into people's pockets because that's useful for people in power and no regulation to protect people was ever put in place.

That makes sense. I do think ignorance is a component — it's not always clear what all the misapplications and implications of a technology are from the start, and regulation tends to move slower than technology does.

Regulation always lags behind, indeed. But tech is special nevertheless. Which other branch of industry is essentially free from liability? Which other branch of industry can openly violate the laws of multiple countries (thinking of Grok on X creating nude pictures of children) without any consequences?

"Democratizing AI" is a polite fiction masking recolonization. Either we redistribute compute, or all sovereignty is theater.

That's what deepseek-r1 had to say while debating with several other models.