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1. Embed this notice
   Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 05:31:29 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

   Armin was once one of the most prolific programmers in Python. Says he never writes code anymore. Seeing more and more people like him write stuff like this on what are supposedly computer programming forums. https://lobste.rs/s/qmjejh/ai_is_slowly_munching_away_my_passion#c_jcgdju

   Notably, once a person crosses this threshold, I see them still hang out on programming forums, but they never talk about any of the puzzles of programming anymore. Only about running agents. Which feels strange and sad. Why hang out on the forums at all then?

   • Steve's Place repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 05:50:00 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     Steve Klabnik also had an interview on lobste.rs. There's a lot in it! It's a cool read! https://alexalejandre.com/programming/steve-klabnik-interview/

     And then it gets to the AI part and he's just like "oh I don't write code anymore".

     And notably Steve Klabnik has a lot to say about code, but it's *all in the past*.

     Lots of brilliant people are becoming non-practitioners.

     Evan Prodromou repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 05:56:24 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     Feeling FOMO about AI? Well here's my advice!

     Stay on top of what's happening. Which doesn't really require *using* the tools. Just see what people are doing.

     Whether or not you do use it, stay a practitioner. And don't fall for the FOMO.

     Your career won't end because you're not making the choice to use AI. (If your employer makes you use it, that's another thing.)

     If you use AI, use it for "summarize and explore" tasks. DO NOT use it for *generate* tasks. That's a different thing.

     If you want to differentiate yourself, *learning skills* is the differentiation space right now.

     These things are easy to pick up. You can do it whenever. But keep learning.

     If you see generated examples, don't paste or accept them. Type them in by hand! The hands on imperative: actually trying things congeals core ideas.

     And if it doesn't help your career... well, your consolation prize is: you'll stay interesting.

   • Embed this notice
     Dan Sugalski (wordshaper@weatherishappening.network)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 05:56:41 JST Dan Sugalski

     in reply to

     @cwebber What's telling, I think, is that all these people go on about how much they're doing and how great AI is to help them build more *but there's no actual demonstrable stuff being done.* I mean, if AI was some kind of Nx multiplier you'd think we'd be getting N times more actual functionality out of software but mostly it seems like the N multiplier only applies to blog posts about how AI multiplies their programming.

   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 06:12:00 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     Also, I think using hosted models is strictly unethical for surveillance and energy usage reasons.

     It *is* true that there are models you can run locally that are much, much more efficient, and I suspect the energy costs on training them can be dramatically reduced.

     I don't use either presently, but using a local model to help you navigate a codebase (as opposed to generating code) is a very different thing, I think. But it's also not what most people are doing!

     And hosted AI models, as I said, I think are fully objectionable from an ethics perspective.

     Datacenters are an antipattern in the general case. AI datacenters, triply so.

   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 06:14:10 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     • Vivien (toujours dans le déni)

     @gugurumbe I'm not saying people *should* use it for summarize and explore, I'm saying that's a different category of concern, if done with a local model.

     However, I'll also point out you were trying to debug LaTeX, which I would argue is a nearly impossible task no matter how many resources are thrown at it ;)

   • Embed this notice
     Vivien (toujours dans le déni) (gugurumbe@mastouille.fr)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 06:14:11 JST Vivien (toujours dans le déni)

     in reply to

     @cwebber I was quite curious LLMs, but I recently had a disappointing experience. I had a common latex problem, but with a more unusual technology stack. It went to “Do this — I get an error — OK do that —…” for a few rounds, nothing surprising. At some point I crossed a line, and it went “OK there’s no way to do what you want with this tech”. As usual, 30 seconds of grepping around in the source code gave me the solution.
     Anyway, I wouldn’t trust it for summarize and explore.

   • Embed this notice
     JWcph, Radicalized By Decency (jwcph@helvede.net)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 06:22:06 JST JWcph, Radicalized By Decency

     in reply to

     @cwebber Also, don't use it for "summarize" because it literally can't do that.

     https://ea.rna.nl/2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actually-does-nothing-of-the-kind/

   • Embed this notice
     Vivien (toujours dans le déni) (gugurumbe@mastouille.fr)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 06:22:24 JST Vivien (toujours dans le déni)

     in reply to

     @cwebber My XKCD-style password is so strong you can’t crack it: “undefined reference begin document”

     https://xkcd.com/936/

   • Embed this notice
     myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 06:23:39 JST myrmepropagandist

     in reply to

     @cwebber

     I have my fifth graders write a program that will convert decimal numbers to Roman numerals. They know that there are already webpages that do this with smart trim programs that always give the right answer. They know they could ask an LLM and probably get the right answers most of the time.

     They still want to solve the puzzle.

     "It works! It works!"

     I've love hearing that when I'm teaching.

     Christine Lemmer-Webber repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 08:51:43 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     • allison
     • brennen

     @brennen @aparrish Wait you're THAT Allison?!?!?!

     BIG fan!!!

   • Embed this notice
     brennen (brennen@federation.p1k3.com)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 08:51:45 JST brennen

     in reply to

     • allison

     @aparrish i've probably said this before, but i have thought an awful lot about your "programming is forgetting" talk from OHS this last ~decade. feels more, uh, perilously relevant of late than ever.

     @cwebber

   • Embed this notice
     allison (aparrish@friend.camp)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 08:51:46 JST allison

     in reply to

     @cwebber (this is actually my main concern about llms. i think people really underestimate how much llms reproduce the values and expectations in their corpus, their reinforcement learning tasks, their explicit engineering, and their product design. and they underestimate the effects that this will have on their understanding of code and the horizon of what's possible to do with code)

   • Embed this notice
     allison (aparrish@friend.camp)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 08:51:47 JST allison

     in reply to

     @cwebber i don't know that i'd trust these models for summarization or navigation. even when the outputs are technically correct, they can leave out certain information or frame the information in a misleading way, papering over whatever makes the code unique and materially suited for the task at hand

   • Embed this notice
     myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 08:52:30 JST myrmepropagandist

     in reply to

     @cwebber

     It took me a long time to find a programing puzzle at the right level for 5th grade. Many things that might seem simple are too complex.

     Making the Roman numeral converter they learn about indexes and lists, place value, and modular division.

     It's really math, and logic. Working out how to present the question made *me* smarter since I had to think about the problem in a new way that avoided aspects of coding that were ... technical without really teaching much.

   • Embed this notice
     Dan Sugalski (wordshaper@weatherishappening.network)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 08:54:24 JST Dan Sugalski

     in reply to

     • Mr. E. Grey Seale

     @geichel ah. Yes. You could say that neither I nor @cwebber have worked on large, complex systems, or worked on significant pieces of infrastructure, or handled production level code and thus are not well equipped to judge. That is indeed a thing you could say.

   • Embed this notice
     Mr. E. Grey Seale (geichel@mastodon.ie)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Feb-2026 08:54:26 JST Mr. E. Grey Seale

     in reply to

     • Dan Sugalski

     @wordshaper @cwebber I don't think you appreciate just how many man years go into writing production level code. My productivity has tripled but if takes weeks to get a prototype in front of 100k+ users. Is not like we're going to release clawd and watch the world burn

     Christine Lemmer-Webber repeated this.