Yea, you have to be proactive. I have friends with non-traditional work schedules to spend time with during the working hours when I take breaks from work. I go to coffee shops and make friends with the workers there. And I make sure to engage in social activities like group cycling. I love WFH but would never make it so I am sitting in front of my computer alone at home 40 hours a week.

I'll give the counter example:

I'm currently leading the adoption of AI at my company and given my extensive use of it both at work and in my personal life, my value at the company has risen as someone that knows how to get the most out of the tool. The whispers are towards needing to get more people to move as fast as I can with the subtle implication that not using AI is seen as less productive or at least slower.

Not saying I know for a fact where all this lands in the future but both view points are at play right now but I would push back that people are just being proxy for AI, they are learning how to get the most out of every interaction to get to the next step of decision making which, for now, is still a very human intervention.

If you are taking AI output and interactively working with it to come to some particular solution, that process of working with it is the value you are adding. The "AI proxy" is specifically about the case where you send a question to someone and literally all they do is paste it to the AI, then send back what the AI said without further work. Literally all they did was proxy your question to the AI.

Yea, but that's just a straw man argument mixed with a little No-True Scotsman. How do you know those people aren't just learning how to use AI and will change over time to be early adopters adapt and using the tool to get work done faster.

If you go back to the article being discussed, the core issue is people not even reading the output. You can't learn from blind copy pasting.

I'm aware of the article. My point is it may be catching a slice of the person's full journey with AI. When I started using it, I blind copied and pasted all the time. Heck, I had a job interview that allowed me to use AI to build an app and I just flat prompted "build out this" and never refined. If you judged me only from that period, you'd miss out that now I am able to iterate, refine, to build a robust program and can spin off tasks with the knowledge that I need to understand what I'm letting it implement before just accepting it.

Do you find talking to an AI with your colleagues as a middleman faster than talking to your colleagues?

Sometimes, yes. Some coworkers ramble and give too much information, some leave out information. Sometimes there's a bit of a language barrier. If I can get to the nugget of what needs to be communicated and understood, it can be faster. But also, sometimes just having a conversation/meeting and having a transcript to break things down via AI is convenient and fast.

Fair enough, though my experience is that AI is much more prone to rambling than my colleagues are.

All of human knowledge (an exaggeration, I know) at our finger tips. It's the most punk rock, anarchist thing tech has done since the internet and it's funny it's shaped as a product.

I think the most punk rock, anarchist thing that could happen is someone leverages the shitty, pre-digested consumer-facing models to orchestrate a cybersecurity incident where the frontier base models are stolen and freely distributed to the public.

The way the Chinese have been running inference against the US models is somewhat what you are saying.

If you get the impression of punk and anarchy, it's only because you're not looking any deeper than the veneer. Underneath, it's nothing like punk or anarchy.

I'm considering the dispersement of tech. 3D printers disrupt needing to buy widgets from big companies and local llms disrupt needing to buy generalize software when you can make your own bespoke. AI will live on long after the big corporations burn out their money coffers.

This is what boggles my freaking mind, it's so cool that this is happening, and most of the people I thought were the cool anarcho-punks are falling on the side of copyright and more capitalism-colonizing the space of ideas. It's crazy!

People cannot even envision a world that's not this transactional thing and it's really sad. In the post-scarcity world it's going to be really hard to reprogram these people. Wasn't there a Star Trek episode about this with a cryonics guy?

If you consider the local llm scene which is closing the gaps, mega corporations become less possessive of all information.

If it is a matter of cost of manufacturing and shipping going up, doesn't that make sense? Can't speak to the digital services going up, however.

Historically last generation hardware is sold at steep discounts compared to original MSRP. The insanity is we live in a world where manufacturing 9 year old hardware has increasing manufacturing and shipping cost, where this was not the case. Another layer of insanity is that Nintendo did the analysis and decided it's going to make sales at this increased price.

it’s a business, not a charity

I think it's commentary on capitalism, not on a company acting out of the ordinary.

You're probably right

It's always going to exist. People still build things with hand tools in the year 2026. Let's call it Artisanal Coding.

Even if you use AI, there's a certain point where it's not clear that an AI would make you faster. F# is my favorite language, and I've been programming in it so long (since 2012) that I feel like I think in F#. Asking an AI for something can be faster if I can state my requirements informally; but if I need to specify many things precisely to an AI... why not just write the code in F#? Part of the beauty of good functional designs is that they are declarative, not imperative, so in some sense you're really just stating what you want, at finer and finer granularities, until what you want is trivial.

Even when I want code written in a different language (e.g., C/C++), I often still start by making a prototype in F#. This helps me nail down the logic without having to worry about things like allocation or layouts. Perhaps I could ask an AI to do this second step for me, and then use the F# implementation as an oracle. Anyway.

> I probably spent over 20 hours debugging, scanning the emu-dev Discord, creating tests, and even throwing the issue at earlier AI models. Nothing worked. But then after a few weeks away from the emulator I tried Claude Opus, and it found the issue in just a few minutes.

Even if you want to write all the code yourself (which is a fine decision), the only reason in 2026 to bang your head against a problem like this for 20 hours is if you really enjoy doing so.

(I'm surprised that "earlier AI models" didn't work for the author. For me, free-tier Gemini gets stuff like this correct all the time.)

Curious, do you work in F#? I looked for jobs using functional langs in my last job change and I found positions extremely rare.

I am a computer scientist, not a programmer. So the short answer is that the language I choose mostly does not matter.

But it already has a name; this noble art is called "programming", or better yet: "hacking".

This app was coded by hands of 32 virgins on a moon lit full moon night.

trad coding

I feel like trad coding would be more along the lines of 'I work 10 hours a day coding for minimum wage because that's a worker's place in life, and I love it!'

It just becomes more abstracted but the thinking is still there. And who is to say we aren’t going to keep reading books, delving into hobbies, or watching movies. All those concepts will then be mixed into the our brains and who knows what new things we will think of to extract out and desire to build with AI.

I think we'll continue to read books and stuff. But many books/movies will probably have devolved into AI slop (not that this hasn't been a trend for the last few decades to a lot of film buffs).

But hobbies like woodworking or instrument seem immune to slop... But people can be creative with what they can sloppify

Wiki: "With an annual budget of about $9.9 billion (fiscal year 2023), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities.[5][6] In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing."

Personal: Always saw them as contributing to PBS kids shows I watch growing up.

I'm curious how this would work with LLMs increasing the speed to prototype. Low stakes changes to try something out, learn from it, and pivot.

My company is fully remote so all meetings are virtual and can be set to have transcripts, parsing through that for the changes needed and trying it out can be a simple as copy-paste, plan, verify, execute, and distribute.

This disregards the benefit of a single device that is easy to carry. Love where this is come from so maybe do both if you can.

It's a trade-off. I love the convenience of ebooks, but not owning my books is just categorically unacceptable to me. I want my daughter and anyone else coming after me to have free access to them, not to have to jump through Amazon's hoops (if such hoops even exist) for access.

I have a Kobo that I use to read the non-DRM ebooks I'm able to acquire. One such source is downloads from the Kobo store, when publishers make the non-DRM file available.

I use a kindle but I have never bought a book on the kindle store ever (been using it for 10 years). Totally doable and not hard to avoid... especially since the smaller stores not only have better sales but the author typically gets more money too.

I own a kindle and use it daily. I just borrow all my ebooks from public libraries. I buy the books I want to keep, in physical form.