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It makes me sad that devs start relying on proprietary online services to be able to work. We have been lucky enough to have FOSS tools to do everything and not
by forty 1y ago
It makes me sad that devs start relying on proprietary online services to be able to work. We have been lucky enough to have FOSS tools to do everything and not to have to rely on any specific service or company to work and some of us are deciding to become like Monsanto-addicted farmers who forgot how to do their jobs without something they have to pay every month.
- danielbln 1y agoThe very recent agentic open weights models seem to be shaping up, so if all fails you can host one of these yourself (if you have the vram) or host it yourself somewhere.
- sneak 1y agoWe can and did work without it. It just makes us many times faster. Nothing about using an LLM removes skills and abilities you already had before it.
- 3836293648 1y agoFor the industry as a whole it absolutely does. And for the individual it absolutely does kill your ability to do it unless you actually do practice. And yes, the goal might be to only use it for boilerplate or first draft. But that's today, people are lazy, just wait for the you of tomorrow
- epolanski 1y ago> And for the individual it absolutely does kill your ability to do it unless you actually do practice. Just because you state it, it doesn't make it true. I could tell you that taking buses or robotaxis doesn't change a bit your ability to drive.
- forty 1y agoDepends how often you do drive. I can guarantee you that not driving absolutely affected my ability to drive (I can still drive but certainly not nearly as well as if I drove daily)
- 3836293648 1y agoAre you seriously claiming that not driving has no affect on your ability to drive? Taking a bus sometimes is fine, but that is missing literally the entire point that I made.
- umbra07 1y agoIf you don't use a skill, it atrophies. Now, maybe that is the future (no more/extremely little human-written code). Maybe that's a good thing in the same way that "x technological advancement means y skill is no longer necessary" - like how the advent of readily-accessible live maps means you don't need to memorize street intersections and directions or whatever. But it is true.
- brookst 1y agoI am terrible at computing sine and cosine, for sure. It doesn’t bother me.
- zelphirkalt 1y agoOn the surface, this comparison might hold, but when you look at software development as a craft, and therefore containing aspects of creativity and art, the comparison no longer holds.
- brookst 1y agoInteresting take. So AI is the Ikea-ization of software, producing far cheaper / lower quality / less durable / more accessible product that is completely good enough for most people, but unacceptable to those who have the expertise to do it themselves, or the wealth to not care about price?
- hoppp 1y agoMy experience was that reviewing generated code can take longer than writing it from scratch. There was research about vibe coding that had similar conclusion. Feels productive but can take longer to review. the moment you generate code you don't instantly understand you are better off reading the docs and writing it yourself
- 14123newsletter 1y ago>Nothing about using an LLM removes skills and abilities you already had before it. Funny story: The widespread of Knorr soup stock already made people unable to cook their own stock soup, or even worse, the skill to season their soup from just basic, fresh ingredients. Source: my mom.
- windexh8er 1y agoI'm always surprised when people buy vegetable stock. So many people I know cook "from scratch" with base ingredients like stock out of a box. And just as with cooking: most people won't care - and the same goes with LLMs. It can be good enough... Less efficient? Meh - cloud. AI slop image? Meh - cheaper than paying an artist. LLMs to get kids through school? Meh - something something school-of-life. I look around and see many poorly educated people leaning hard into LLMs. These people are confusing parroting their prompt output as knowledge, especially in the education realm. And while LLMs may not "remove skills and abilities you already had before it" - you damn sure will lose any edge you had over time. It's a slippery slope of trading a honed skill for convenience. And in some cases that may be a worthwhile trade. In others that is a disaster waiting to happen.
- brookst 1y agoI remember being beholden to commercial (cough, pirated, cough) compilers and assemblers back in the day. FOSS is awesome but often lags because capital sees a chance to make money and can move faster. It will change. There will be FOSS models, once it no longer takes hundreds of millions of dollars to train them.
- pythonguython 1y agoDo you mind sharing what industry you’re in where you can fully rely on FOSS? In my industry we’re dependent on MATLAB, Xilinx tools, closed source embedded software and more. To name a few industries: game devs might be stuck with unity, finance quant devs might be stuck with Bloomberg terminals, iOS app devs are stuck with apple’s tooling etc… this isn’t just an LLM problem IMO.
- aprdm 1y agobackend web services devops frontend javascript just three possible examples
- forty 1y agoThat's a good remark. As my sibling said, backend and web dev. But indeed it always struck me that some developpers decided to become Apple developpers and sacrifice 30% of everything they ever produce to Apple. I would argue that it might a bit different though, because when doing iOS development it's possible that you don't lose you core skill, which is building software, and that you can switch to another platform with relative ease. What I think might happen with LLM is that people will lose the core skill (maybe not for the generation who did do LLM-less development, but some devs might eventually not ever know other ways to work, and will become digital vassals of whatever service managed to kill all others)
- arvinsim 1y agoI think it's less about reliance and more about competition. Sure, devs can still work without AI. But if the developer who uses AI has more output than the one that doesn't, it naturally incentives everyone to leverage AI more and more.
- forty 1y agoThat's a big if. People might feel faster because there is more "movement", but it's not clear if overall they are actually signicantly faster (though everyone would like us to believe so). And note that I objected online services, local LLM don't have the same issues.
- epolanski 1y agoPeople who use it extensively may know whether it makes them significantly faster or not.
- hvb2 1y agoThere's 2 problems there 1. 'faster' is subjective since you cannot do the same task twice without the second time being biased by the learnings from the first pass 2. While speed might be one measure, I've rarely found speed to be the end goal. Unless you're writing something that's throw away, you'll be reading what was written many times over. Long term maintainability is at odds with speed, in most cases.
- epolanski 1y agoYou're implying that LLMs make maintainability worst when the opposite could happen if you know how to use the tools.
- zelphirkalt 1y agoBut the tools are trained on tons and tons of mediocre work and will have a strong tendency to output such. Please share your prompts aimed at preventing mediocre code entering the code bases you work on. So far almost no code I got from LLMs was acceptable to stay as suggested. I found it useful in cases, when I myself didn't know what a typical (!) way is to do things with some framework, but even then often opted for another way, depending on my project's goals and design. Sometimes useful to get you unstuck, but oh boy I wouldn't let it code for me. Then I would have to review so much bad code, it would be very frustrating.
- stingraycharles 1y agoDevs have been doing this for years. If Github goes down, it has a huge impact on dev productivity.
- forty 1y agoHas it? We don't use GitHub in my company, but our self hosted Gitlab occasionally goes down, and while it prevents us from merging (including doing code reviews) and deploying code, it does not prevent us from doing most of our work (ie designing and creating software). It merely delays the moment when things are shipped. If you meant goes down for good, then I'm sure it would be annoying for a few weeks for the FOSS ecosystem, just the time to migrate elsewhere, but there is not much GitHub specific we would really miss.
- epolanski 1y agoIt makes me sad that couriers start relying on third party wheeled machines like cars and motorbikes.
- hvb2 1y agoYou ignore the fact that there are many suppliers there with plenty of competition. The 'take me from A to N' is a pretty broad problem that can have many different solutions. Is that comparable? We can all see this end up in a oligopoly, no?
- conradfr 1y agoDo their motorbikes stop working in the middle of the week if they make too many deliveries or ask them to pay multiple the base rate for the remaining time?
- yunohn 1y agoHuh? We’re discussing the equivalent of tradespeople who need a high quality drill to work instead of cheap knockoffs or worse, no tools.