Because they don't "got it". Asking the bot to program is the same as asking a junior engineer to write some code, and then claiming it as your own. It's not actually them programming. Just a misplaced sense of pride.
More gatekeeping, more no true Scotsman fallacies, more bitter cope.
You can absolutely take pride in having raised your own cows. But the guy down the street can also take pride in having cooked his own steak. In fact, the guy down the street might actually be a better chef than you, even though you know how to breed cattle.
You're wrong because you are making the wrong comparison.
In this analogy, The guy down the street didn't cook his own steak. He told someone else to cook the steak. And then claimed that he himself cooked it. Telling himself, "wow, I'm a great chef!". When In fact, he did not cook the steak.
Your greatness as a chef isn't measured by how well you manage restaurant kitchens. That would be a great manager. Your greatness as a chef is measured by actually cooking yourself. Claiming other chef's work as your own would be dishonest and self-deception.
If we want to stretch this analogy a bit - I believe all world-level chefs have a team of sous-chefs working for them. Doing things like chopping ingredients, prepping things, in fact probably doing a lot of th cooking. I think building with ai is pretty similar.
This is the exact analogy that Gene Kim and Steve Yegge used throughout their book Vibe Coding: Building Production-Grade Software With GenAI, Chat, Agents, and Beyond.
You have it completely backward, in fact in the culinary arts your greatness as a Chef is entirely dependent on being a manager of restaurant kitchens.
You get judged on the final end product, the full dining hospitality experience, as had by influential customers on a random night (like Michelin inspectors).
The food is just one factor of that experience, and the overwhelming majority of that food on any given night is not actually prepared by the chef with their name on the door, but by his/her staff (the AI Agents in this analogy).
Yes it's very obviously written by AI and made me immediately close the tab. Not gonna read a self-promotional piece written by an LLM that someone probably only gave it one sentence prompt: "merge these ideas".
Right, people misuse this term "democratized" all the time. Because it sounds nice. But it's incorrect.
Democracy is about governance, not access.
A "democratized" LLM would be one in which its users collectively made decisions about how it was managed. Or if the companies that owned LLMs were ran democratically.
It can be about both meanings. The additional meanings of democratize to describe "more accessible" are documented in Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries:
I've been wondering recently if there's some practical path forward for some sort of co-op based LLM training. Something which puts the power in the hands of the users somehow.
The claim isn't that the LLMs are democratized. The claim is that LLMs are causing software development to be democratized. As in, people who want software are more able to make it themselves rather than having to go ask the elites for some. As in, the elites in IT now have less power to govern what software other people can have.
(Or alternatively, it's getting harder to stamp out "shadow IT" and all the risks and headaches it causes.)
But the LLMs are quite the opposite: People should not bother with developing software, but ask the big LLM providers to do it for them instead.
In all aspects of the term, software is getting less democratized. But that is in line with a decades long trend, where computers used to ship with BASIC installed and now you need a specialized IDE tool which has a learning curve.
It used to be that you could dabble with HTML but now you need to learn a few javascript frameworks just to modify existing code. You used to start a piece of software by running it, modern server software is a fragile jigsaw that is delivered to production in the cloud. The list goes on. The future we are being promised is that you ask your paid-for development agent to make the necessary changes you require and deliver in to production in the cloud.
Which is fine, in a way, but it shifts power to the professionals. Just as Google, Apple or Microsoft owns your identity and your data, and you pay to use it, they can also decide to deny access for any reason. They are private companies, after all, and it is their data.
If software development were democratized, then decisions that software developers make would be made democratically. On or off the job. On the job, the workplace would be run democratically, instead of as it is now, dictatorially. Or off the job, groups of engineers would be coming together to create governance and make collective decisions about the software they use, like the Debian project or the recent Nix governance. Neither is the case.
Building yourself a table using some new carbon fiber hammer isn't democracy. That's just consumerism.
Hard to state that LLMs "democratize" software development when LLM companies can ban you from software development for any reason or no reason at all, and without recourse of any kind. The HN frontpage currently showcases an Antigravity ban that applied across Gemini, and there's few companies that provide affordable LLM services.
The actual elites greatly extended their control over software development, that's the opposite of democracy
This only remains true so long as open weight models lack significant utility.
Access to compilers was almost as controlled as access to LLMs to prior to the GNU toolchain and Linux putting a C compiler and unix (ish) machine in the hands of anyone who cared for one.
The problem is compute and memory. I think OpenAI bought RAM supply mainly to choke the ability of consumer hardware to run open weight models (that hit the memory bottleneck before other constraints). Now there's a shortage in other components as well. I don't see how local AI can compete in usefulness.
This kinda misses the larger point. How are billionaires created? By the structure of the capitalist firm. The capitalist gets all of the wealth created by the organization and unilaterally can decide what to do with it, running the organization as a dictator. That is the bug. "Billionaire" is simply the most obvious and egregious form.
The class interest of the billionaire capitalist is the same as the class interest of the millionaire capitalist is the same as the class interest of the small business owner. Unless all of the capitalists leave, the capitalist class will still control the entire economy of California.
People don't realize that "philanthropy" is a standard way for ultra-rich to peddle influence and store their money to avoid taxes. Many philanthropies invest their donations and actually make money off investments every year, spending little. It is an investment vehicle. And an easy way to accept bribes. And for influence, take for example Bill Gates' "philanthropy" to fund charter schools and undermine public schools, ultimately enriching charter school capitalists.
This thread showcases exactly why they do this: It is enough to simply slap the name "philanthropy" on something in order to have people thinking it is good and defending you. It is an effective PR stunt, which is why they all do it. Don't be the fool.
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