3 ms·

I wholeheartedly agree. I'm not saying LLMs are 'bad'. I'm not saying they are not useful. But to me personally they take out the fun parts from my profession.

I wholeheartedly agree. I'm not saying LLMs are 'bad'. I'm not saying they are not useful. But to me personally they take out the fun parts from my profession. My role changes from coming up with solutions to babysitting a robotic intern. Not 100% of course. And of course an agent can be useful like 'intellisense on steroids'. Or an assistant who 'ripgreps' for me. There are advantages for sure. But for me the advantages don't match the disadvantages. LLMs take the heart out of what made me like programming: building stuff yourself with your near infinite lego box of parts and coming up with ideas yourself. I'm only half convinced the LLMs will become as important to coding as they seem . And I'm hoping a sane balance will emerge at the other end of the hype. But if it goes where OpenAI etc. want it to go I think I'll have to re-school to become an electrician or something...

dnautics 10mo ago
> LLMs take the heart out of what made me like programming: building stuff yourself with your near infinite lego box of parts and coming up with ideas yourself. i feel like that's all im doing with llms. just in the last hour i realized that i wanted an indexed string internpool instead of passing string literals. the LLM refactored everything and then i didn't have to worry about that lego piece anymore.
- maybewhenthesun 10mo ago
  Good for you it feels that way to you. But then you need to check how the LLM refactored stuff. Because (a) you never know if it's actually correct and (b) the code needs to be maintained into the future, so you need to know how it works and be able to fix bugs in it. And then you are suddenly spending a lot more time understanding someone else's code, someone you can't discuss the 'why' of the code over a coffee with. Of course the same goes for library code but to me understanding bugs in a library (and reporting/fixing them) feels more useful than understanding the one-off output of an LLM. And for a library the coffee part might not fly, but at least you can discuss stuff with the original author(s). I'm not saying my feeling is the absolute truth, it's very subjective. I guess mechanics must feel the same about modern computerized cars, where suddenly the injection timing is no longer a mechanical gadget you can tweak by experience, but some locked down black box you don't have control over. Also I really dislike that (for now) using an LLM means selling your soul to some dubious company. Even if you use only the free tier you still need to upload your code and let the LLM do whatever with it. If an LLM is an indispensible part of being a programmer, everybody will be held hostage by the large techfirms (even more...). edit: I suddenly thought of the famous aforism by Brian Kernighan: "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? " I fear we will end up with programs nobody understands anymore.
  - dnautics 10mo ago
    idk. its pretty easy to look over the diffs and catch the worst of stuff. a few things do slip through bug i dont find it hard to scour over the code, bad stuff stands out or is easy to grep. here's my current project, judge for yourself: https://github.com/ityonemo/clr https://github.com/ityonemo/clr
  - theshrike79 10mo ago
    > you never know if it's actually correct With software you can check this. Have automated tests. Tests pass? Good enough. You think it's not? Then have better tests. > Also I really dislike that (for now) using an LLM means selling your soul to some dubious company. Even if you use only the free tier you still need to upload your code and let the LLM do whatever with it. If an LLM is an indispensible part of being a programmer, everybody will be held hostage by the large techfirms (even more...). LLMs should replace tasks, not jobs. Use this bubble of practically free LLM time to build tools for yourself. Every single utility and automation you've been thinking of can be built in minutes, permanently. If you build something that uses a cloud LLM, build it so that you can switch it to use a local model at any point. Even if the bubble bursts one way or another, the local models will still be there.
throw1235435 10mo ago
As I mentioned in another comment they smell blood in our profession, and as entities dependent on investor/VC/seed money rounds they want it. There's a reason every new model that comes out has a blog post "best at coding" often in their main headline - its also a target that people outside of tech don't really care about IMO unlike for example art and writing. Tbh if it wasn't for coding disruption I don't think the AI boom would of really been that hyped up.
- tasuki 10mo ago
  > don't think the AI boom would of really been that hyped up. For one thing, LLMs aren't terrible at grammar.

dnautics 10mo ago

> LLMs take the heart out of what made me like programming: building stuff yourself with your near infinite lego box of parts and coming up with ideas yourself. i feel like that's all im doing with llms. just in the last hour i realized that i wanted an indexed string internpool instead of passing string literals. the LLM refactored everything and then i didn't have to worry about that lego piece anymore.

maybewhenthesun 10mo ago
Good for you it feels that way to you. But then you need to check how the LLM refactored stuff. Because (a) you never know if it's actually correct and (b) the code needs to be maintained into the future, so you need to know how it works and be able to fix bugs in it. And then you are suddenly spending a lot more time understanding someone else's code, someone you can't discuss the 'why' of the code over a coffee with. Of course the same goes for library code but to me understanding bugs in a library (and reporting/fixing them) feels more useful than understanding the one-off output of an LLM. And for a library the coffee part might not fly, but at least you can discuss stuff with the original author(s). I'm not saying my feeling is the absolute truth, it's very subjective. I guess mechanics must feel the same about modern computerized cars, where suddenly the injection timing is no longer a mechanical gadget you can tweak by experience, but some locked down black box you don't have control over. Also I really dislike that (for now) using an LLM means selling your soul to some dubious company. Even if you use only the free tier you still need to upload your code and let the LLM do whatever with it. If an LLM is an indispensible part of being a programmer, everybody will be held hostage by the large techfirms (even more...). edit: I suddenly thought of the famous aforism by Brian Kernighan: "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? " I fear we will end up with programs nobody understands anymore.
- dnautics 10mo ago
  idk. its pretty easy to look over the diffs and catch the worst of stuff. a few things do slip through bug i dont find it hard to scour over the code, bad stuff stands out or is easy to grep. here's my current project, judge for yourself: https://github.com/ityonemo/clr https://github.com/ityonemo/clr
- theshrike79 10mo ago
  > you never know if it's actually correct With software you can check this. Have automated tests. Tests pass? Good enough. You think it's not? Then have better tests. > Also I really dislike that (for now) using an LLM means selling your soul to some dubious company. Even if you use only the free tier you still need to upload your code and let the LLM do whatever with it. If an LLM is an indispensible part of being a programmer, everybody will be held hostage by the large techfirms (even more...). LLMs should replace tasks, not jobs. Use this bubble of practically free LLM time to build tools for yourself. Every single utility and automation you've been thinking of can be built in minutes, permanently. If you build something that uses a cloud LLM, build it so that you can switch it to use a local model at any point. Even if the bubble bursts one way or another, the local models will still be there.

throw1235435 10mo ago

As I mentioned in another comment they smell blood in our profession, and as entities dependent on investor/VC/seed money rounds they want it. There's a reason every new model that comes out has a blog post "best at coding" often in their main headline - its also a target that people outside of tech don't really care about IMO unlike for example art and writing. Tbh if it wasn't for coding disruption I don't think the AI boom would of really been that hyped up.

tasuki 10mo ago
> don't think the AI boom would of really been that hyped up. For one thing, LLMs aren't terrible at grammar.