> Eh. That's not as good as being skilled enough to know exactly what you want and have the tools to make that happen.
I mean, do you know that? A tool that offers this audible fluent experience needs to exist before you can make that assessment right? Or are vibes alone a strong enough way to make this judgement? (There's also some strong "Less space than a Nomad. Lame" energy in this post lol.)
Moreover why can't you just have both? When I fire up Lightroom, sure I have easy mode sliders to affect "warmth" but then I have detailed panels that let me control the hue and saturation of midtones. And if those panels aren't enough I can fire up Photoshop and edit to my heart's content.
Nothing is stopping you from taking your mouse in hand at any point and saying "let me do it" and pausing the LLM to let you handle the hard bits. The same way programmers rely on compliers to generate most machine or VM code and only write machine code when the compiler isn't doing what the programmer wants.
So again, why not?
> So again, why not?
Because at my heart I'm a humanist, and I want tools that allow and encourage humans to have and express mastery themselves.
> Nothing is stopping you from taking your mouse in hand at any point and saying "let me do it" and pausing the LLM to let you handle the hard bits. The same way programmers rely on compliers to generate most machine or VM code and only write machine code when the compiler isn't doing what the programmer wants.
IMHO, good tools are deterministic, so a compiler (to use your example) is a good tool, because you can learn how it functions and gain mastery over it.
I think an AI easy-button is a bad tool. It may get the job done (after a fashion), but there's no possibility of mastery. It's making subjective decisions and is too unpredictable, because it's taking the task on itself.
And I don't think bad tools should be built, because the weaknesses of human psychology. Something is stopping you "from taking your mouse in hand at any point and saying 'let me do it'," and its those weaknesses. You either take the shortcut or have to exercise continuous willpower to decline it, which can be really hard and stressful. I don't think we should build bad tools that should put people in that situation.
And you're not going to make any progress with me by arguing based on precedent of some widely-used bad tool. Those tools were likely a mistake too. For a long time, our society has been putting technology for its own sake ahead of people.
> And you're not going to make any progress with me by arguing based on precedent of some widely-used bad tool. Those tools were likely a mistake too. For a long time, our society has been putting technology for its own sake ahead of people.
Your comment is pretty frustrating. HN has definitely become more "random internet comments" forum over the years from its more grounded focus. But even when "random internet comments" talk to each other, you expect a forthrightness to discuss and talk. My reading of your comment is that you have a strong opinion, you're injecting that opinion, but you're not open to discussion on your opinion. This statement makes me feel like my time spent replying to you was a waste.
Moreover I feel like an attitude of posting but not listening when using internet forums is corrosive. In fact, when you call yourself a humanist, this confuses and frustrates me even more because I feel it's human to engage with an argument or just stop discussing when engagement is fruitless. Stating your opinion constantly without room for discussion seems profoundly inhuman to me, but I also suspect we're not going to have a productive discussion from here so I will heed my own feelings and disengage. Have a nice day.
> My reading of your comment is that you have a strong opinion, you're injecting that opinion, but you're not open to discussion on your opinion. This statement makes me feel like my time spent replying to you was a waste.
Eh, whatever. I was just trying to prevent the possibility of a particularly tiresome cookie-cutter "argument" I've seen a million times around here. I don't know if you were actually going to make it, but we're in the context where it's likely to pop up, and it'd just waste everyone's time.
Also this isn't really opinion territory, it's more values territory.