You may not take it seriously, and I may not take it seriously, but it takes one person to read this seriously, convince another person to invest, and then hire a third person and tell them, "make it so", for the joke to no longer be a joke.
A developer getting paid because an investor misunderstands a technology isn’t anything we need to get too worried about, I think. It seems to be a big part of our industry, and I don’t know if that’s ever going to change. I sometimes think of all the crapware dApps that got shoveled out in the last boom - little of meaning was created from a technical standpoint, but smart people got to do what they love to put bread on the table.
Perhaps I’m being overly simplistic, but I don’t see it as all that different from contractors getting paid to do silly and tasteless renos on McMansions. Objectively a bad way to reinvest one’s money, but it’s a wealth transfer in the direction I prefer, so I’ll hold my judgement.
Fair enough. I'm not going to complain much about money moving towards the workers, but I also hate obvious waste as a matter of principle. I also hate being dragged into bullshit work against my will.
I had a close call many years ago - my co-workers and I had to talk higher-ups out of a desperate attempt to add something, anything, that is even tangentially related to AI or blockchains, so either or both of those words could be used in an investor pitch...
That's when I fully grokked that buzzword-driven development doesn't happen because someone in management reads a HBR article and buys into the hype - it happens because someone in management believes the investors/customers buy into the hype. They're probably not wrong, but it still feels dirty to work on bullshit, so I steer clear.
Investors know to "sell the shovels" [to use a gold-rush concept] and are investing into well-diversified positions; which include the likes of GPT's capacity: nVIDIA, AMD, TSMC, MSFT &c — these are the shovels which speculators must buy (or utilize via kWh / price of another's GPT-instance), and I assure you is the case.
If somebody putting a few millions into making this widespread were enough to make it a problem, then software development would already be doomed and we would better start learning woodwork right now.
The argument is stochastic. Maybe this joke will get ignored, but then we could've had the same conversation few years ago about "prompt engineering" becoming a job, and here we are.
Or about launching a Docker container implementing a single, short-lived CLI command.
Or about all the other countless examples of ridiculously complicated and/or wasteful solutions to simple problems that become industry standards simply because they make it easier to do something quickly - all of them discussed/criticized regularly here and elsewhere, yet continuing to gain adoption.
Nah, our industry values development velocity much more than correctness, performance, ergonomics, or any kind of engineering or common sense.
> Maybe this joke will get ignored, but then we could've had the same conversation few years ago about "prompt engineering" becoming a job, and here we are.
The joke is on all of us if we only treat this as a joke. Rails pioneered simple command line templates and convention over configuration, and it took over the world for awhile.
An AI as backend is the logical conclusion of that same trend.
