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>In essence, they are only adequate in niche situations (like creative writing, marketing, placeholder during iterative design, …) Placeholders, sure. But I'm

>In essence, they are only adequate in niche situations (like creative writing, marketing, placeholder during iterative design, …) Placeholders, sure. But I'm surprised you don't know about the utility it has in a programming context. I was kicking the tires on Claude for a personal thing the other day - "given this data and this output I want, write a utility function" - and it quickly gave me something that gave me exactly what I needed on the first try. I also had an extended session recently where it really helped me with the "naming is hard" problem. Naming is hard and it's nice to have a rubber duck that has a certain understanding of your code and is able to throw a bunch of ideas at you quickly. I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. And I'll emphasize your "placeholder" point: sometimes it's not even about the solution it gives, it's about the process of articulating the problem and getting something out there. A lot of times the first iteration of anything is the hardest to complete, and it can really cut down the time to achieve that.

ezst 1y ago
As I said, I don't reject LLMs for every situation (what you describe would probably fit the "iterative design" category). But as soon as this personal affair meets the wider world, inevitably becomes too big and transient to be thoroughly understood, and accelerates the rate of minimally-supervised code reviews sent to very human peers ; is where I have a bigger issue: individual convenience shouldn't incur more work and effort to others, nor become an increased risk to stakeholders. It is in that sense that I see LLMs challenge "social contracts": their use is infectious (probably also in the GPL-sense, be warned) and should be agreed upon by all parties upfront (do you want to be on the receiving end of a software that you pay good money to have developed while knowing that its developers have little understanding of its workings? How many times cheaper is cheap enough to pay-off the amount of technical and institutional debt/risk? Can LLMs effectively become that cheap?).

ezst 1y ago

As I said, I don't reject LLMs for every situation (what you describe would probably fit the "iterative design" category). But as soon as this personal affair meets the wider world, inevitably becomes too big and transient to be thoroughly understood, and accelerates the rate of minimally-supervised code reviews sent to very human peers ; is where I have a bigger issue: individual convenience shouldn't incur more work and effort to others, nor become an increased risk to stakeholders. It is in that sense that I see LLMs challenge "social contracts": their use is infectious (probably also in the GPL-sense, be warned) and should be agreed upon by all parties upfront (do you want to be on the receiving end of a software that you pay good money to have developed while knowing that its developers have little understanding of its workings? How many times cheaper is cheap enough to pay-off the amount of technical and institutional debt/risk? Can LLMs effectively become that cheap?).