We are one in the Spirit. We are one in the Lord.
We are one in the Spirit. We are one in the Lord.
And we pray that our unity will one day be restored.
- Peter Scholtes
I am a Catholic. I am an openly queer Catholic. I am an American Catholic. I am an Irish Catholic. I am a Catholic that swore off the sacraments for over a decade. I am a Catholic who kept a rosary in her desk drawer through most of that period. I am a Catholic that admires the Quakers and the Unitarian Universalists. I am a Catholic that finds joy in following along the structure of the Order of Mass every single time.
The Catholic Church considers their authority to be derived from the charge to St Peter and passed down through the generations in the unbroken chain that is the Diocese of Rome. Being, in their own eyes, the worldly authority on spiritual matters the Church internally decided for hundreds of years questions of Theology and Philosophy, compiling them into the Canon and Dogma of the Church.
However despite a culture of internal debate, the Vatican has historically not responded well to external challenges at the root of its authority. Reformers who took aim at what the Church considers its foundations were met with scorn at best and extreme violence at worst. Although the modern Church has embraced ecumenical dialogue, that the Christian community around the world remains so splintered is in part a consequence of that fractious response to criticism.
The challenge to reform our traditional foundations is uncomfortable. It calls into question the truths that ground us, and the practices that echo in our hearts. We have good reason to want to protect our foundations, and if they’re carelessly discarded we risk collapsing into disorder. But sometimes the reformers are right that something has to change, however painful. Listening to both of those concerns and giving each appropriate consideration is difficult.
We will walk with each other. We will walk hand in hand.
I am a Software Engineer, and I have been in this line of work long enough that most of it is still from before the era of AI. My friends and colleagues have begun to filter into two distinct groups, with an increasingly sharp divide. On the one side are those who I will call “the reformers”, whose thesis is that AI is the future of Software Engineering, full stop. On the other side are the “traditionalists”, who hold that the productivity gains AI promises are a mirage.
At the same time that these two sides are pulling away from each other they’re also more convinced than ever that the other side is doomed. The reformers see the quantity and quality of the output of the LLMs continue to go up, and they conclude that soon anyone avoiding AI on principle will be unable to compete. The traditionalists see the rising cost of running the models and the amount of human intervention still needed to keep them on track, and they conclude that the AI titans will either run out of money or jack up their prices and kill off almost all of their customers.
The incompatible worldviews shape how they see the effect of the current AI boom on the Software Engineering ecosystem. Forges are struggling under unprecedented load, to the traditionalists means AI tooling is wastefully monopolizing shared resources, but to the reformers is just growing pains as platforms adapt to new workflows. CVEs and dependencies are churning faster than ever before, which to the reformers is a victory for automation taking over work humans couldn’t or wouldn’t do without it, but to the traditionalists means burying overburdened maintainers in busywork to fix hypothetical bugs no human would even encounter.
Projects and platforms themselves pick a side too. GitHub has publicly put its weight behind AI tooling to the point of making it a major paid feature, while Codeberg just announced that LLM-driven projects are no longer welcome. Some big names in FOSS are welcoming the new AI era and publicly lauding it for enabling single developers to make major changes, but others are going further in the other direction and locking down external contributions citing spam and bad actors.
I must admit that I have been on the side of the traditionalists so
far, although my stance has softened over time. When folks started
showing me how they set up a simple CRUD server with the coding agent du
jour, my first thought was that rails generate could do
that in ~2010. I’ve avoided using coding agents for anything personal
basically on principle, and I’m picky enough that AI generated code
still mostly strikes me as shoddy and overworked. And my opinion of AI
as a user is miserable because it’s frequently foisted on me by
companies that I think want to capture their customers instead of listen
to them.
But I live in the real world and I’ve used coding agents for work, and I must admit I’ve found the most advanced ones pretty impressive. I feel like I can still do better when I’m really in the zone (I can beat it debugging code in familiar territory for sure, and even at writing code I can get it the way I want pretty darn fast), but they’re fast and consistent, and the kinds of guardrails that make them work accurately (good tests, good docs) are things humans would need and things the agents are good at adding. If I was doing contract work I could certainly see the allure of having a consistent extension of myself on tap, even if it’s imperfect. Combined with the inherent “friendly” quality of a tool rooted in a conversational flow, my insistence is starting to feel a bit dogmatic.
There’s something to be said for sticking to your guns, and I don’t think I’m ready to give up that line just yet. But as two halves of the professional community are building in the opposite direction from each other the fact that my own position is starting to look more like a difference of taste gives me pause. I think the reformers who brush off their responsibility to be good public citizens and the traditionalists who dismiss any notion of the value of lowering barriers to entry are doing themselves a disservice. Folks in both camps feel a strong pressure to go all or nothing, make a stand for one extreme or the other, lest they end up with no community at all. I worry that this era will go down in history as a great schism, whose echo will be felt long after the two camps have finally made up.
And we’ll guard each other’s dignity and save each others’s pride.
I have enjoyed reading the most recent Papal Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. One of the major themes is the need for a society that values the dignity of workers. That work is integral to the human condition and when society fails to appropriately respect the creativity and humanity of labor it robs daily life of fulfillment. I think in some ways the growing divide between the reformers and the traditionalists relates to an inability to fully respect each other’s dignity.
The traditionalists of course have many abuses to point at. Some of AI’s most public corporate backers have been openly gleeful about the ability to replace paid specialists with pure automation (with a skeleton crew of overworked human tenders to clean up after them). AI as an extension of control is not bound by ethical qualms that might limit the degree to which skilled professionals comply with an unjust command. Early models were created through exploitaitive data harvesting and now their owners stand to profit handsomely from that original sin. I can’t blame somebody for wanting to distance themself from that on ethical grounds.
However, the reformers make some salient points about how Software Engineering has happily cultivated a culture of exclusivity and status. Scarcity of good talent handsomely rewarded mostly the select few with access to elite universities, and most of those were all too happy to apply that talent to squeezing more and more productivity out of gig workers. Reformers see their work dismissed by the traditionalists as cheap and valueless and they understand it as a sort of snobbery that is primarily interested in perpetuating its own petty tyranny. While I think that certainly many of the complaints of shoddy AI “slop” are genuine, I think the reformers are not wrong to see determination to find fault in AI generated content as significantly driven by ego.
I think both sides need to find reassurance from each other that their work is valuable and that their skills contribute to society. The traditionalists may need to respect the further democratization of their technical abilities, and acknowledge that the tools of the trade will inevitably change over time. The reformers may need to pledge themselves further to valuing human dignity over unbridled progress, and take responsibility for the outsized resources their newfound capabilities demand (plus the externalities they impose, and on who). But I think most importantly both groups need to start imagining a world where they make progress together as a community rather than one where their side wins.