The author brings up several examples along the lines of: 'why write a blog post about how something was built' or 'why bother making a technical note public', or 'why bother writing a new language', etc, since the LLMs will just ingest it and never credit you and no one will know.

What this really points to is a new ecosystem which is now built on theft.

I agree, the depression is real, and it has destroyed the community of code as well as the individual spirit of wanting to do, well, anything. What's the point of building anything? Anyone could prompt an AI to get some result, there is no real intelligence necessary. But what has led to this situation? Theft. The plundering of all our collective work and all the intellectual effort that was put into it.

This became really clear to me today while I was playing around with the new Illustrator/Photoshop AI-coded ripoffs of the Adobe suite. (Excuse me, VectorCraft is an "open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Illustrator, rebuilt in pure Rust" per their Github).

I may loathe Adobe and wish I didn't have to pay them another dime. But there is a fundamental difference between a group of people sitting down to build a replacement for Illustrator (like e.g. Affinity), and someone prompting an AI to just rewrite Illustrator from scratch. The AI is laundering other people's work. The AI contains a compressed version of billions of lines of code, and from that it is unpacking essentially a pirated Frankenstein binary, washed of attribution. It may have no lines of code in common with Illustrator, but everything it has was taken from code that someone wrote.

Imagine someone writes a book and you want to distribute it for free. If you reconstruct the book by taking random words clipped out of newspapers and pasted together, that's still a copy of the book.

The question is, what's anyone's motivation to write anything anymore? Who's going to write a new, better language? But we would not be in this situation except for the grand theft which allowed the creation of LLMs in the first place.