Interesting to see how “magical” and manichean the anti-ai discourse can be, at least here on mastodon. Things and people are irredeemably tainted by #ai , a single commit with a Claude code signature is enough to leave a project behind, ai is like the one ring, ai is a brainworm, ai rots your brain, etc… ngl but it feels like walking into a rationalist bar at times. (Assuming most discourse is about #llms) I get that word machines really put a strain on our understanding of what it is to be a communicating human, and specifically warp the brain of people whose job (and this being mastodon, most probably passion) it is to fiddle with symbols (I certainly am), but if anything, it should allow us to be a bit more nuanced about the topic. The speed at which models have evolved in the last year has honestly taken me by surprise, and even though I see some way to feel relevant still _as a programmer_ (vs as a designer or builder), meaning as someone who thinks hard about manipulating symbols, I’m pretty sure even that is going to be gone in a year. But I will not give in to magical thinking or stop trying to talk about it as a technology that produces symbols (as if that wasn’t enough), not some human devouring moloch.