My year of mourning for the death of the type of coding I used to do before Opus 4.5 came out last November is over. As part of the process of coming to terms with it I’ve spent a decent amount of time in some fairly overtly anti-AI spaces online. This is my parting constructive feedback to those spaces in general.
One thing I see is a lot of handwavey appeals to the idea of trade unionism as a strategy to oppose AI, but unions are not magic. All union leverage ultimately comes from controlling a chokepoint in the supply side of the labour market: if employers want to buy a certain kind of work, the people who sell that work have power when they negotiate as a collective. What’s happening now is a shift on the demand side of the market: the kind of work employers want to buy is changing.
Unions are probably more important than ever in software engineering given the pace of change in the field. It’s important to exercise influence over how the changes impact us. But even if supermajority consensus against selling agentic coding work existed among software engineers, which (importantly) it doesn’t, the demand side of the labour market is not something you can control with a strike.
Putting that aside, let’s assume meaningful resistance of some vague non-union kind is possible given a sufficiently large mass movement. Building a mass movement requires convincing people to switch to your side. Convincing people to switch to your side is best accomplished by prioritising certain actions and behaviours (e.g. creating cool AI-free spaces) and avoiding certain others (e.g. cliquish nastiness towards the out-group).
The behaviours I see suggest a lack of clarity around goals. If there was consensus around movement-building as a goal I think you’d see less performative dunking on outsiders and more emphasis on the upsides of your own vision. The ordinarily-very-friendly Lexaloffle BBS has an example of this I want to use. The anti-AI policy there is a great idea on the whole, but it does have its downsides, and this post captures one of them.
Without AI, I was never honestly going to get this game anywhere near finished with the time I have to work on it. I’ve got a full-time job, a busy teenager and a spouse with cancer. Time is not my friend. The occasional 30-60 minute chunks of time I can carve out to code for the fun of it are barely enough to get my mental context stood up, let alone make much progress.
Rather than some AI spammer moaning about losing a channel, it’s a balanced, heartfelt post accepting the upsides of the AI policy and expressing sadness about falling on the wrong side of it. The full post is worth a read. The author comes off as a likeable, kind person who regrets but respects the policy. A couple of the replies really stuck with me.
If you’re mad that you can’t share your stolen slop with the community here so you can soak up the credit, that’s a you problem, not an us problem.
I’m frankly tired of being polite to LLM asshats. there’s plenty of other platforms to unleash your industrial scale mediocrity onto. don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Obviously we can all choose what we say to anyone about anything, but there’s a trade-off here. Prioritising that emotional kick of angrily policing the in-group/out-group boundary comes at the cost of being a behaviour that tends to shrink rather than grow the size of your community over time. Being overtly nasty might make you feel alive for a moment but it’s in conflict with any meaningful real-world goals, and it’s so normalised in anti-AI spaces that I’ve come to the conclusion that the whole thing is more about venting collective grief about unwanted change than achieving anything concrete.
I think the anti-AI policies on platforms like Codeberg and the Lexaloffle BBS are great (even when they exclude some of the things I make). And probably a grace period of letting people be a bit complicated with each other over all this change isn’t too bad an idea either. In the long run though I see work ahead for many AI-free spaces in establishing social norms around not being big angry wankers about it. That, or just becoming slightly smaller communities every day, I guess.