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The thing about predicting doom is that you're wrong often--until one day you're not. Most hype cycles involve people at the top making wild claims that fail t

The thing about predicting doom is that you're wrong often--until one day you're not. Most hype cycles involve people at the top making wild claims that fail to deliver. I don't know anyone outside the industry who ever thought 3D TVs were worth anything, and barely anyone who thought VR was worth anything. Google pitched AI making appointments, but that never made it off a stage. Hype? Only for some definition of hype. Smartphones have changed the world, but it was primarily Apple who pushed the "post-PC" narrative, and that was to promote the iPad, one of their least successful product lines. (To be clear: it's still a HUGE business and success, but it didn't usher in the post-PC world Steve Jobs claimed it would.) One you left out is cryptocurrency, and that's the only one I can think of where the hype came from more than just the people at the top, mostly because everyone down the chain thought they were also people at the top by virtue of buying in. Financial scams are always hype by their nature. I'm older than some, younger than others, but in more than 30 years as a professional developer, I think this is as close to a "silver bullet" as I've ever seen. Like GUIs and IDEs, I think LLMs are tools that will make some things much easier, while making other things slightly harder, and will generally make developers as a class more productive. There's no question that developers using a nice IDE to write high-level code on a large monitor are able to product more code more quickly than someone writing assembler on a dumb terminal, I hope. The shift from monochrome ASCII to GUIs helps, the shift from a text editor to an auto-completing, stub-writing IDE helps, and similarly, I think having an LLM offer up a first pass approximation for any given problem definition helps. Concerned? I'm not concerned, I'm excited! This isn't marketing hype coming from someone on a stage, it's grassroots hype coming from nobodies like me who are finding it actually-helpful as a tool.

eropple 4y ago
> I think having an LLM offer up a first pass approximation for any given problem definition helps. This is, strictly scoped, true. But the future is people with capital deciding that the computer output is Good Enough because it costs 0.1% as much for maybe 60-70% the value. People who write code are probably not sufficiently upstack to escape the oncoming Enshittification of Everything that this portends, either in terms of output or in terms of economic precarity.
JohnFen 4y ago
> There's no question that developers using a nice IDE to write high-level code on a large monitor are able to product more code more quickly than someone writing assembler on a dumb terminal, I hope. This is true. It's also true that the code they produce is of lower quality. In practice, for the most part, this doesn't matter because the industry has decided that it's more economical to make up for poor quality code with more performant hardware.

eropple 4y ago

> I think having an LLM offer up a first pass approximation for any given problem definition helps. This is, strictly scoped, true. But the future is people with capital deciding that the computer output is Good Enough because it costs 0.1% as much for maybe 60-70% the value. People who write code are probably not sufficiently upstack to escape the oncoming Enshittification of Everything that this portends, either in terms of output or in terms of economic precarity.

JohnFen 4y ago

> There's no question that developers using a nice IDE to write high-level code on a large monitor are able to product more code more quickly than someone writing assembler on a dumb terminal, I hope. This is true. It's also true that the code they produce is of lower quality. In practice, for the most part, this doesn't matter because the industry has decided that it's more economical to make up for poor quality code with more performant hardware.