My anti-AI takes aren't popular, weird

Doing the thing is doing the thing

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Prakhar Gupta

Software Engineer, LITM

Being anti-technology is like being anti-tree. Technology is non-negotiable, it's just a fact. But individual technologies, like forests, can change over time. And individual applications of a technology, like trees, which are particular, contextual, and concrete, can be modified to suit the user and his environment.

LLM-assisted coding can be used to good effect, but I think it's pretty clear at this point that its impact has so far been a net negative on productivity in real terms.

LLMs are demolishing the low-code industry because they are a perfect fit for that kind of work. If trade-offs exist, then they are a less optimal fit for other kinds of work (though maybe a viable alternative). The corollary is that the work you feel most productive doing with LLMs is probably the same kind of work low-code products were intended to address (and mostly failed to do so).

Just published the text for a talk I gave last week at a local libertarian forum. It's aimed at the type of person I go to church with, but I put a lot of work into articulating my argument for freedom technology. View article →

Stay Home A Poem by Wendell Berry I will wait here in the fields to see how well the rain brings on the grass. In the labor of the fields longer than a man’s life I am at home. Don’t come with me. You stay home too. I will be standing in the woods where the old trees move only with the wind then with the gravity. In the stillness of the trees I am at home. Don’t come with me. You stay home too.

"When you preach against technology or the Machine it can be very easy to sound like a sort of ascetic killjoy who doesn't want anyone to have any fun. But the machine isn't any fun! Very, very boring." Paul Kingsnorth

Read Ray Bradbury