We'll talk about how to manage this. | adafruit | Page 1

To put a finer point on it... I've been following the wider discourse around Adafruit's recent push to LLM All The Things, and the Opinions people have about that, and public responses to those opinions. On the whole, I'm feeling mystified and alienated as a customer, writer, and developer. The vibes are weird (not in a good way).

I totally get the value proposition of using coding agents in terms of developer efficiency and throughput. As a customer and community developer though, I'm not feeling great about the direction of recent changes. Things are happening in a way that feels corrosive to healthy community.

To cite one example, tokens are expensive, and their use has social and environmental consequences. The more emphasis (yt, socials, here, etc) that gets put on using workflows that rely on burning lots of tokens, the more it feels exclusive to developers who are not being paid a high hourly rate to participate in this project. (speaking of direct personal experience here) If you have to have a $200/month Anthropic subscription to play the game at the level of the core devs, and if you have to be willing to take on the associated social baggage, that substantially narrows the field of who can participate.

NOTE: I'm not claiming anybody here said that. Rather, I'm pointing out implied subtext and social context of what has been said. Also, this is not a pro-AI or anti-AI statement. My point is, adoption of AI is having, and will continue to have, profound social and professional consequences for people who write software, or who aspire to write software, and those consequences aren't evenly distributed. That ship has sailed, it's in the process of kicking off vast social upheaval, and we're all gonna have to figure out how to live with the consequences. In the absence of careful efforts to prevent it, lots of people are gonna get left behind.

#We'll talk about how to manage this.