You don't get it because for you destination is more important than the journey. And it is fine. Probably.
For me and (likely) for OP as well it is the opposite. Result is meaningless without the process. I can't take fruits of my labor (whichever labor it can be) to the grave, and if you remove the process of growing and picking said fruits, then where is "you" in that? Did you really "achieved" anything? Or whatever you wished for just magically appeared in front of you with little effort from your side?
Where is the fun of renting a helicopter that would carefully put you onto mountain's summit and pick you up 5 minutes later?
I am working tirelessly and often long nights, on top of a day job.
My effort has shifted to QA testing, reviewing UI designs, and delegating the agents on the implementation.
I will consider it an achievement if I manage to publish a successful app.
Where is the "me" in that? I am guiding the design of every screen and feature the way I would like it to be.
On top of that I make technical decisions on how it is implemented.
Apart from the loads of QA work I will have to handle the business side as well.
As of now it's hardly as trivial and effortless as some make it out to be.
Yes, I no longer write the code, and sometimes it feels frustrating that any teenager without experience could perhaps build a similarly good app soon.
Overall I'm still happy I can now build much larger and better apps and realistically publish them in my free time, for a chance to make serious money.
>Where is the "me" in that? I am guiding the design of every screen and feature the way I would like it to be.
I disagree. I think you're actually giving up so many little decisions.
You are delegating decisions to agents all the time. In place of your slow but still personal decisions, you are ok with decisions that might be similar to what the LLM believes to be the best average, or the best solution based on what limited experience of the world they were trained on. The Ai devil for me is in these details.
That is probably fine for a lot of use-cases, but it's still removing your own agency from the process itself willfully, and yet still taking all of the merit. And to me that makes the final thing less of a byproduct of you and your experiences.
I am not black and white on this, and there are different degrees to the issue.
But I just cannot accept this approach that trades the nature of the output for the quantity of it.
And frankly, a lot of other people feel the same. Check the data on the explosion of apps and how little they are maintained or picked up by final users.
I expect those are low quality apps churned out with minimal effort.
For the design of my app, I try to imitate the UX of Apple's first party apps.
I checked the competitors, and what is in the AppStore looks like it was built in 2015, and only updated to add Ads and subscriptions. Surprisingly, I did not even see vibe coded apps for my use case.
Well is so beyond poisoned that it is the groundwater which tastes like toxic waste now, no matter where you will try to dig up your own well.
Transport layer that used to be clean as mountain air now full of hungry eyes peeking at you through the nether.
Russia followed China's playbook and inserted black traffic-filtering boxes, which particularly dislike anything that looks like encrypted messaging. EU and rest of "developed" world is eager to have the same.
Listen on port 1492 for the signs of civilization collapse, listen to the sounds of silence.
Of course it is an encrypted messaging. But it is safe as long as root certificates are not being imposed to be issued by government agencies only. Which is very easy to mandate in a totalitarian government. Want your website to serve customers in our jurisdiction? Then you ought to use certificate issued by us.
A famous monk, who maintained empty website to make a point about Zen, wakes up in the middle of the night because LLM crawler had broken in past captcha -- except the crawler couldn't find anything of value on his website. So the monk listened to the futile rummaging sounds of HDD's head for a while, and feeling bad for the crawler's company, put his lifetime worth of manuscripts on the website. The crawler was so surprised by the kindness of the monk that it started to crawl his website 100 per second, DDoSing it out of existence.
My problem with LLMs (apart from philosophical aspects and economical impact) is that it would be unlikely for any of us to be able to train something functional locally (toy-like LLMs -- sure, but something really useful -- no). Apart from that it requires immense computing power, it also requires a dataset which is for the most part is obtained illegally.
Not the whole thing, at least with current technology, but LoRAs are really good at fine tuning, and can be generated in a few hours on high-end gaming computers, so as long as the base model is in your language, you likely have enough spate computing power, in whatever electronics you own, to train a few LoRAs a month.
In the future, when regular home computers have the capabilities of modern servers, we'll be able to train the entire LLM at home.
I may personally be of modest intelligence, but to acquire the intelligence that I do have, I did not need to train on every book ever written, every Wikipedia article ever written, every blog post ever written, every reference manual ever written, every line of code ever written, and so on. In fact, I didn't train on even 1% of those materials, or even 0.00000000001% of those. The texts themselves were demonstrably not a prerequisite for intelligence.
At minimum, given that it only took me about 20 years of casual observation of my surroundings to approximate intelligence, this is proof positive that the only "dataset" you need is a bunch of sensors and the world around you.
And yes, of course, the human brain does not start from zero; it had a few million years of evolution to produce a fertile plot for intelligence to take root. But that fundamental architecture is fairly generic, and does not at all seem predicated on any sort of specific training set. You could feasibly evolve it artificially.
What does this even have to do with the parent? Your capabilities have nothing to do with LLM capabilities. The two work in completely different ways. The reason LLMs work is because they are huge and have been trained on vast amounts of data, full stop. Sure, there's potential someday to get something useful using less data, but we aren't there.
You are right on the limitations of the architecture but I wouldn't call LLMs huge. Flagship models maybe but that's just because they don't scale very well.
A universal translator with image and voice recognition and a decent breadth of encyclopedic knowledge in only a small fraction of an English Wikipedia dump(6GB/20+GB) is not "huge".
It is probably closer to the theoretical limit than anyone could have expected.
There is so much technology that we are unable to reproduce locally, I don't think LLMs are in any way different. There will be large LLM manufacturers, small LLM manufacturers, LLM artisanals, LLM enthusiasts and of course LLM consumers, just like with everything.
And this is important because even though you are running a model locally, it's still a proprietary model. You have no say in what it was trained on, how that training data is labeled, what the guardrails are, what biases it might have, none of that.
That sounds like government. So your problem is mostly that you expect to have a collective social effort, but not enough to pay for it as a public good.
Depends on the domain. There are plenty of different use cases where the data needed for training is available for personal, or non-commercial, use. At that point, it does come down to compute/time to do the training, which if you are willing to wait, consumer grade hardware is perfectly capable of developing useful models.
I agree with you and have similar thoughts (maybe, unfortunately for me). I personally know people who outsource not just their work, but also their life to LLMs, and reading their exciting comments makes me feel a mix of cringe, fomo and dread. But what is the engame for me and you likes, when we finally would be evicted from our own craft? Stash money while we still can, watching 'world crash and burn', and then go and try to ascend in some other, not yet automated craft?
Yeah, that's a good question that I can't stop thinking about. I don't really enjoy much else other than building software, its genuinely my favorite thing to do. Maybe there will be a world where we aren't completely replaced, we have handmade clothes still after all that are highly coveted. I just worry its going to uproot more than just software engineering, theoretically it shouldn't be hard to replace all low hanging fruit in the realm of anything that deals with computer I/O. Previous generations of automation have created new opportunities for humans, but this seems mostly just as a means of replacement. The advent of mass transportation/vehicles created machines who needed mechanics (and eventually software), I don't see that happening in this new paradigm.
I don't think that's going to make society very pleasant if everyone's fighting over the few remaining ways to make livelihood. People need to work to eat. I certainly don't see the capitalist class giving everyone UBI and letting us garden or paint for the rest of our lives. I worry we're likely going to end up in trenches or purged through some other means.
If you want to know where it's headed, look at factory workers 40 years ago. Lots of people still work at factories today, they just aren't in the same places they were 40 years ago and now req an entirely different skill set.
The largest ongoing expense of every company is labor and software devs are some of the highest paid labor on the planet. AI will eventually drive down wages for this class of workers most likely by shipping these jobs to people in other countries where labor is much cheaper. Just like factory work did.
Enjoy the good times while they last (or get a job at an AI company).
While I agree with your whole take, there is one point that triggered me.
What most¹ people don't get when they say "just learn to deal with your emotions" is that some of us "feel" emotions way more strongly than others. For me personally emotions are pain, far more stronger than actual physical pain is. Both unpleasant ones and pleasant ones. While I've learned to "deal" with it as I grew older, it's not a walk in a park, cost me solid chunk of my mental energy and that's what I need to do every fucking day.
Most people would say "but hey, that's what makes life worth living!". Not for me, I would rather prefer not to feel anything at all than to be subjected to a constant never-ending roller-coaster I can't get off² from. If walking past sick stray animal would maybe cause you³ a slight discomfort, for me would be excruciating feeling in my chest which I can either suppress (and live with the choice for the rest of my life) or drop whatever I was doing to try to help (and to subject myself to more pain in the process). There is no win for me here.
And yes, I've tried many-many things under the Sun, the truth is that I was just born this way. And I'm not alone like that. So telling to "just deal" with emotions is not helpful.
___
¹⁾ I'm not saying you don't, just bear with me for a moment.
Now, this painter works for your house exclusively every day 40 to 60 hours each week total, 2-5 years, and because of their work you sell house for 1,000x of the original price. You now go to live luxury life without need to ever work again, while painter continue their meager life painting another house 8 hours every day.
I would say that is a pretty dumb painter. Definitely wildly talented at painting, but incredibly unintelligent. Just paint the house like you were paid to.
You might think I was making an analogy, and hence tried to break it, but it wasn't an analogy. Its the same thing. You own something, you pay people to work on it, it's still all yours afterwards.
Those with a 1000x return almost universally recognize that they have the talent to not work for someone else. Or they do work for someone else, but make far, far, more than a house painter to do it.
Those are probably less than 1% of the population. The majority don't even approach 2x, much less 1000x.
