1131
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
1131 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
87598 readers
3860 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm sorry but to me your comment is a bit misguided. You raise extremely valid point and are completely right in what you say, and yet all your argument fails to prove that software development hasn't changed.
The difficult part was understanding requirements and problem solving: absolutely true. Yet most of the time of a developer was spent in writing code. Now it's spent refining the analysis so that the LLM stops producing slop. And many programmers are doing it, even with all its downsides, because for them the fun part is understanding the requirements and problem solving, not writing code nor delivering fast. They are delegating those tasks to a machine, even with all the risks and issues.
Your second point (and the anecdote) further proves how programming changed. Before it was unthinkable that some random person, likely with no clue about what they are doing, would refactor an entire codebase in a night.
Both are massive changes. For the best? Arguably not, but I seriously doubt there will be any going back now.
The thing is that actually doing this isn't faster than writing the code, robs the practitioner of learning, and more often than not doesn't actually happen, so you have a harder to maintain codebase with more bugs and less knowledgeable developers to maintain it.
Edit: and as a fun bonus accelerates glacier melting!
Not at all. It gives the practitioner the option of skipping the learning.
Starting in the 1990s I started skipping the learning of assembly language, compilers got good enough that I just don't need to know how the latest SIMD/MIMD/ whatever instructions work, I just express what I want in C and gcc or whatever handles the optimization for me.
Comparing it to an (almost) entirely complete abstraction where you (almost) never have any benefit to looking under the covers like c over assembler is completely dishonest.
Is it, though? In the early 1990s I could still optimize compiler output by hand, here and there. In the 1980s it was common practice and necessary in many circumstances to make complex things happen on the constrained hardware. In the 1970s there were a lot of programmers who never touched Fortran, just practiced assembly all the time because Fortran was too inefficient for their needs.
I'll say that LLMs, this year, are something like compilers were in the 1960s - a revolutionary improvement in accessibility of coding, being able to express what you want in "natural language" - like COBOL did starting in 1959.
LLMs have plenty of pitfalls that COBOL doesn't today, but I'll note that Borland Turbo C++ compiler in 1991 was too damn buggy to do anything much more complex than "Hello, World." with.
Yes. Acting like an LLM over a programming language is anything close to a higher level over lower level programming language makes you completely full of shit.