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  • :heart_cyber: JesseBot :they_them:jessebot@social.open.engineering
    Oct 11, 2026, 3:40 PM

    It remains wild to me just how bad AI generated anything looks when you're a subject matter expert in that thing.

    Similarly, it remains really sad to me when I see Claude "generate" code, and then find the project from 8 years ago that it completely word for word stole from.

    I assume LLMs are absolute magic to people who don't know anything about a given subject matter, and as someone who is currently going through wisdom of the ancients for exim configurations, I can almost understand the appeal, but like, the worst possible outcome imo here is that I use a chatbot, and it seems to work, but then I offer this as a service to real customers, and it breaks, and I literally don't understand the product well enough to help, so then I need to keep visiting chat bots over and over again to ever do my job, tacking on more and more expense and ruining my ability to troubleshoot anything, which is what I pride myself on: because I'm an engineer.

    My whole profession and skill set is built around my ability to build complex systems, troubleshoot them, scale them, and optimize them for reliability and availability in worst case scenarios. There's an art to this work and the meticulous documentation to do it correctly such that it will run long after you die.

    I know a lot of people will say "but I just use LLMs for the non-creative boring stuff" and like, as someone whose skillset is that "non-creative boring stuff": That fucking hurts.

    #noAI

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Replies

  • :heart_cyber: JesseBot :they_them:jessebot@social.open.engineering
    Oct 11, 2026, 4:24 PM

    I watched this TED talk ages ago when I first graduated high school:
    https://www.ted.com/talks/denis_dutton_a_darwinian_theory_of_beauty

    I don't know how well Denis Dutton has aged, but this talk used to mean a lot to me, because it explained something about myself and my interests to me. I'm autistic and have ADHD and so there's things in this world I find truly beautiful that other neurotypical people maybe don't. I find them to be art, because I see them as uniquely skillful, in ways that only some boring pre-AI tech grey beards can appreciate sometimes. I used to often feel guilty for liking things that aren't easily explainable to people outside my profession and specific enthusiastic circles. I still do sometimes.

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  • :heart_cyber: JesseBot :they_them:jessebot@social.open.engineering
    Oct 11, 2026, 4:34 PM

    But something that helps is realizing that the skills I've honed over the past couple of decades can actually help people. I don't have to build the next Orphan Crushing Machine 9000. I can work to provide resilient infrastructure for people and orgs I believe in. Sure, they may not all be able to really appreciate what I consider to be the art, but they can appreciate that others can download their software and run it with ease or that their website is up and they don't have to talk to support about it. They can appreciate that they can find the documentation to do their jobs. They can appreciate that they have a place to store their files, and when bad things happen, they have backups.

    A lot of what I do is take existing pieces of software, and find the most optimal way to package it and make it available for free to the FOSS community. I write some of my own software, but I largely take other people's FOSS projects and improve their testing pipelines, package them, dockerize them and push them to repo of their choice, create ornate helm charts that wrap those docker containers, package and make those available to all, and then create reusable secure infra, all backed up as code to deploy all of that instantly with no effort. I build things to help others to share information and technology. And even if I'm not building the central piece, I play an important role.

    If a FOSS programmer, who writes a web app, is a painter, I, as a FOSS systems engineer, am a frame maker, photographer, and art curator that runs a series of art shows at public libraries across the world. I may not specialize in portraits, but I specialize in a sculpture of sorts for something to hold your masterpiece and display it all over the world simultaneously in the best possible light.

    I don't want AI doing that for me.

    This is my skilled human action.

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  • dataramadatarama@hachyderm.io
    Oct 12, 2026, 11:54 AM

    @jessebot I don't want AI doing my skilled human action for me either, but sadly, upper management does. And, increasingly it seems, so does all of society.

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