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LLMs in their current state are very useful writing tools but not necessarily good thinking tools. A programmer can be more productive because boilerplate can b
by s_dev 1y ago
LLMs in their current state are very useful writing tools but not necessarily good thinking tools. A programmer can be more productive because boilerplate can be generated with a prompt like other 'templating' procedures but it's just far more flexible.
I recall a professor in my university stating that there is a vast difference between knowing information and having access to information. While this distinction in the era of the internet, search engines and smart phones seems slight the distinction is becoming more and more important.
It's worth stating because we are 'knowledge' workers and pride ourselves on our ability to learn and adapt. Every technological advancement has made certain jobs redundant and yet the prophecies that people will sit around idling and twidling their thumbs has never come close to fruition.
There will always be 'work' because there are things we want to do and things we don't want to really do and work is simply the latter. We all wish to work purely to buy our future laziness even 'security' can be understood in this sense.
It will be intersting to see how our learning institutions adapt -- pretty soon CS grads will have classes on how LLMs work in theory and more so in practice -- how to prompt effectively.
I'm less fearful than many -- this is just as someone put it before 'auotmation on steroids'.
- luckylion 1y ago> It's worth stating because we are 'knowledge' workers and pride ourselves on our ability to learn and adapt. I don't think this is universally true for people working in IT. For some it definitely is, others don't care about their work and avoid learning and adapting at all cost because it's effort. They want the paycheck, but you'll need to threaten them with termination to get them to learn something new.
- throwaway31131 1y agoThose regular paycheck jobs exist but they’re never going to be safe and they’ve never been safe. I’ve been in tech for decades and waves of safe jobs disappearing happens regularly as technology improves. I view these types of articles as 2025’s version of the 2003 article below, which was very big news in its day. Outsourcing didn’t cause all American programming jobs to go away but it did raise the bar. Expect the bar for “professional programmer” to go higher still. And expect to level up your skills if you haven’t already. On the flip side, the number of amateur programmers is likely to increase a lot with improved tooling. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/training-your-own-replacement/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/training-your-own-replacement/
- suddenlybananas 1y agoUnfortunately one of the most important aspects of writing is that it helps you think clearly. A writing tool that sidesteps that part of the process will lead to deeply confused writings and people.
- krona 1y agoI find the 'rubber ducking' process of writing a hard problem down in to a concrete well articulated question is actually useful, even if the response is nonsense (which it is, maybe half the time.)