I would like to know if there are programmers, communities, conferences, companies, forums etc, where people deliberately refuse to use any forms of AI tools for software development.
I'm looking for the same-minded people who are willing to keep developing hand-made things, and don't want to use AI tools at least in personal projects. If there are already existing communities, I will be glad to join.
What I mean by not using AI tools:
1. It means that you don't use it at all, not even GitHub Copilot for code completions. Everything you create, you made by hand.
2. If you are using AI for something else aside from your personal projects - it is ok. For example, if you are requested to use it on your current job, or like to discuss with ChatGPT your cooking recipes on weekends, it does not count as using AI for software development.
To clarify, I'm not against AI. This technology is marvelous, and it is totally fine if you are using it. I'm just looking for people who don't use it, because they don't want to.
If I had a choice I wouldn't use AI for anything, ever. It's a blight on humanity. But it is a blight everyone has chosen so we are stuck with it.
My reasoning in not using AI is many-fold. First, I am a powerful learning model, the most powerful one I have access to. This model is so powerful that to reach its true potential I must continually feed it huge amounts of learning experiences and training data. I must seek out other unique perspectives and try to understand them. There is virtually no end to the amount of data this model in me can process and integrate using tools like "philosophy" and "logic".
Second, it seems to me that models have shown us that the human limitation is not our ability to think, but how fast we can type. The model-first people think that means that we must find a way to offload all our ideas to agents, since agents are on the other side of the low-bandwidth interface that is the keyboard. I just think we need to give them more expressive tools: an instrument, not an assistant.
Third, most people have stopped believing in the potential of great software. They seem to think that the tools we have now are the best that can ever be made, so by their reasoning there wouldn't be much point to getting good at building new things when instead you could learn to copy what already exists.
If you're interested in the tools we're making to mint a whole new generation of (human) hackers, I would urge you to come check out the BABLR Discord! It's where we work on our tools, talk philosophy, and boot anyone who tries to sell us their AI shit. https://discord.gg/NfMNyYN6cX
Every line of this code in the BABLR ecosystem was written by human hands too: https://github.com/orgs/bablr-lang/. In five years of full-time OSS work I've built a streaming regex engine, the world's most powerful streaming parser, a language-agnostic AST/CST format, and a data serialization language that will eventually replace both XML and HTML.