I felt like this was something meta, but thanks for putting it clearly. It is a reasonable observation, but I feel like it’s a bit tangential to tool being a tool and is more about the context luggage that a tool carries
Ah I see, you’re saying it’s not “just a tool” because there is a whole political thing in companies about being forced to use it, which doesn’t normally apply to ordinary tools.
You may be right but it’s kind of irrelevant. When people say “it’s just a tool” they’re trying to assert that it isn’t going to fundamentally change anything about our jobs or society. It’s “just a tool” like a debugger or an IDE or a static analyser.
Your argument doesn’t really say anything about that assertion. So you’re sort of right, but in a way that nobody cares about.
And for what it’s worth the “it’s just a tool and isn’t going to fundamentally change anything” people are very clearly delusional (or they haven’t used Codex in the last 6 months). There is absolutely no way this is “just a tool”. Most people I speak to really have stopped writing code by hand. It’s going to completely screw young people looking to get white collar jobs. A debugger never did that.
Than I’m glad I didn’t waste too much of your time 🙂 There is an argument hidden in there, it is:
If your work isn’t about results anymore, but which tools you used, something is off and a tool isn’t just a tool anymore.
Especially if you’re forced to use something destructive like LLMs.
I felt like this was something meta, but thanks for putting it clearly. It is a reasonable observation, but I feel like it’s a bit tangential to tool being a tool and is more about the context luggage that a tool carries
Ah I see, you’re saying it’s not “just a tool” because there is a whole political thing in companies about being forced to use it, which doesn’t normally apply to ordinary tools.
You may be right but it’s kind of irrelevant. When people say “it’s just a tool” they’re trying to assert that it isn’t going to fundamentally change anything about our jobs or society. It’s “just a tool” like a debugger or an IDE or a static analyser.
Your argument doesn’t really say anything about that assertion. So you’re sort of right, but in a way that nobody cares about.
And for what it’s worth the “it’s just a tool and isn’t going to fundamentally change anything” people are very clearly delusional (or they haven’t used Codex in the last 6 months). There is absolutely no way this is “just a tool”. Most people I speak to really have stopped writing code by hand. It’s going to completely screw young people looking to get white collar jobs. A debugger never did that.