this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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190
The Copilot Delusion (deplet.ing)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
66 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The thing I hate the most about AI and it's ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul—brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots. [...]

There was once magic here. There was once madness.

Kids would stay up all night on IRC with bloodshot eyes, trying to render a cube in OpenGL without segfaulting their future. They cared. They would install Gentoo on a toaster just to see if it’d boot. They knew the smell of burnt voltage regulators and the exact line of assembly where Doom hit 10 FPS on their calculator. These were artists. They wrote code like jazz musicians—full of rage, precision, and divine chaos.

Now? We’re building a world where that curiosity gets lobotomized at the door. Some poor bastard—born to be great—is going to get told to "review this AI-generated patchset" for eight hours a day, until all that wonder calcifies into apathy. The terminal will become a spreadsheet. The debugger a coffin.

Unusually well-written piece on the threat AI poses to programming as an art form.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Stupid comparison, tbh. Scribing is just boring and repetitive work, programming is cognitive work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago

There are definitely parts of programming that are boring and repetitive. I’ve been using AI to speed that up. I still do the creative parts 100% myself.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's wildly incorrect and somehow serves to underscore the original point.

Scribes were not glorified photocopiers; they had to reconcile poorly written and translated sources, do a lot of research on imperfect and incomplete information, try to figure out if the notes in the margin should be included in future transcriptions, etc. Their work required real subject matter expertise, training and technique, was painstaking and excruciating, and many hand written manuscripts are absolutely works of art.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Then I apologise about my ignorance on the matter, but you're now making the same point as the author - were you mocking or sharing their perspective?

There's a lot that goes behind "work" that you don't see in the final output. It's important to care about that art, and a shallow copy is just not the same as "the real thing". Right?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Both, I think? Respecting the craft and expertise of the way we used to do things is important, but the author is being melodramatic and I wanted to poke some fun.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

That's something people have wondered since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Is a mechanically mass produced widget the real thing? People even make fun of the biological locally grown artisanal produced food and the recycled hand made furniture. Shein is quite popular with their fast fashion. Except the rich will have tailor made clothes of course.