> But don’t be the out of touch Kung Fu master, heir to lifetimes of tradition, that gets mauled by an amateur MMA fighter.

I have an issue with this analogy, since a professional MMA fighter is a highly skilled individual who has honed their body through years of training.

A more apt analogy might be "don't be the kung fu master who believes they can survive an atomic bomb, dropped from far above by a pilot who does not understand how it works, but who has nevertheless been gifted the ability to deploy it."

Some context. Many styles of Kung Fu/Gung Fu do not spar in any meaningful sense. Consequently, they have an overinflated opinion of their own ability and generally do very badly against MMA fighters (who do lots of sparring and pressure testing). There are lots of videos on Youtube of Kung Fu 'masters' getting battered by relatively inexperienced MMA fighters. This was sufficiently embarrassing for Chinese martial arts that they created a sport oriented form called Sanda.

I once saw an early black and white film of 2 Chinese Kung Fu masters fighting in a ring. Some sort of grudge match I think. It was embarrassing. You would see better technique outside a Wetherspoons pub at 2am.

I would say analogy is still apt.

When you look at King Fu master as a software dev who refuses to use AI and MMA fighter as a dev who embraces AI.

Vibe coders who know nothing about software development are untrained rubes who got mechanical arm that thinks for itself, they can maul MMA fighter, they can maul Kung Fu master but at the same time arm might just rip off their own face.

But he said amateur.

You could do this before AI, though. Just download a big repo off github and build the binaries yourself. Or is that not enough obfuscation to convince yourself you made it?

Never would have.

I love the argument that “AI code doesn’t feel like mine :(“ but you’ll use some shit library from 12 years ago??

Are any of you actually developers? Ffs

Well no I, wasn't doing that either. Because it would be kind of silly to take someone else's code and say "I made this" just because I ran some build script, wouldn't it?

> we cannot RSI

Speak for yourself.

You could train an LLM on a dataset that intentionally excludes certain data, and see if it is able to extrapolate outside of its dataset and come up with those excluded items independently.

For example, remove all code from your training data, and then see if the model can code regardless.

Expecting to go from having seen no code to being able to code within a context window is a pretty high bar. More useful would be asking for code that does something you're pretty confident no-one has done before.

(TBH, when people claim this, I do wish there would at least be occasionally an actual pointer to something that was copied. I understand it's probably not going to be doable in all cases, but without examples it sure feels like a weak statement. In my experience the recent models are good at doing things I'm pretty sure there is not a close reference for in the training data, though for most part I wouldn't classify them as particularly difficult tasks either)

Thanks for the elaboration. (Though I'm not sure dmarinus would agree with your criterion?)

> For example, remove all code from your training data, and then see if the model can code regardless.

Would you accept this weaker version: make up a new programming language (that's guaranteed not to be in the training set), and see if the model (which has trained on programming in existing languages) can cope?

Yes, things are really great everywhere else.

You're speaking directly to his marketing trap.

I don't post there anymore but I do still check my DMs once a week, because every now and then someone will find my work through there, and I need people to find my work in order to survive. I unfortunately can't easily trade that in for a platform that no one visits.

Tbf plenty of us were “acting” like NFTs were bad then too.

> I hope that we’ll collectively decide that it’s rude to pass off LLM writing as your own, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

I think it could happen.

When everyone first started tagging each other's face and location, I immediately hated it. It felt like an incredible violation of privacy, and I couldn't understand why anyone would do it. Now, finally, the zeitgeist is starting to catch up, and it's common to hear even "normies" worry about who is snooping on their data.

This process took about 20 years. I suspect LLM etiquette will take roughly the same.

> I'm intrinsically motivated to work on my software projects because I want them to exist

Isn't that extrinsic motivation? You're motivated by the desire to bring something outside of yourself into existence. The software project doesn't exist within you.

I think you may be applying extrinsic too broadly. I believe it's still intrinsic because it's about an internal feeling and desire rather than the threat of bad grades, punishment, or coercion from someone else. It's about the motivation, not the output.

I think you're right. The "because" should have applied to the clause that followed.