8 ms·

I don't trust the idea of "not getting", "not understanding", or "being out of touch" with anti-LLM (or pro-LLM) sentiment. There is nothing complicated about t

I don't trust the idea of "not getting", "not understanding", or "being out of touch" with anti-LLM (or pro-LLM) sentiment. There is nothing complicated about this divide. The pros and cons are both as plain as anything has ever been. You can disagree - even strongly - with either side. You can't "not understand".

slfnflctd 9mo ago
> There is nothing complicated about this divide [...] You can't "not understand" I beg to differ. There are a whole lot of folks with astonishingly incomplete understanding about all the facts here who are going to continue to make things very, very complicated. Disagreement is meaningless when the relevant parties are not working from the same assumption of basic knowledge.
- illusive4080 9mo ago
  Bolstering your point, check out the comments in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1qy9dcs/who_has_completely_sworn_off_including_llm/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1qy9dcs/who_has_compl... There’s a lot of unwillingness to even attempt to try the tools.
  - cruffle_duffle 9mo ago
    Those people are absolutely going to get left in the dust. In the hands of a skilled dev, these things are massive force multipliers.
    - skydhash 9mo ago
      It doesn’t matter how fast you run if it’s not the correct direction.
      - baq 9mo ago
        Good LLM wielders run in widening circles and get to the goal faster than good old school programmers running in a straight line
        skydhash 9mo ago
        I still haven’t seen those mythical LLM wielders in the wild. While I’m using tools like curl, jq, cmus, calibre, openbsd,… that has been most certainly created by those old school programmers.
        uludag 9mo ago
        I try to avoid LLMs as much as I can in my role as SWE. I'm not ideologically opposed to switching, I just don't have any pressing need. There are people I work with who are deep in the AI ecosystem and it's obvious what tools they're using It would not be uncharitable in any way to characterize their work as pure slop that doesn't work, buggy, untested adequately, etc. The moment I start to feel behind I'll gladly start adopting agentic AI tools, but as things stand now, I'm not seeing any pressing need. Comments like these make me feel like I'm being gaslit.
        kombookcha 9mo ago
        We are all constantly being gaslit. People have insane amounts of money and prestige riding on this thing paying off in such a comically huge way that it can absolutely not deliver on it in the foreseeable future. Creating a constant pressing sentiment that actually You Are Being Left Behind Get On Now Now Now is the only way they can keep inflating the balloon. If this stuff was self-evidently as useful as it's being made out to be, there would be no point in constantly trying to pressure, coax and cajole people into it. You don't need to spook people into using things that are useful, they'll do it when it makes sense. The actual use-case of LLMs is dwarfed by the massive investment bubble it has become, and it's all riding on future gains that are so hugely inflated they will leave a crater that makes the dotcom bubble look like a pothole.
        match_condition 9mo ago
    - matsemann 9mo ago
      That's one of the sentiments I don't quite grasp, though. Why can't they just learn the tools when they're stable? So far it's been sooo many changes in workflows, basically relearn the tools every three months. It's maybe a bit more stabilized the last year, but still one could spend an enormous amount of time twiddling with various models or tools, knowledge that someone else probably could learn quicker at a later time. "Being left in the dust" would also mean it's impossible for new people / graduates to ever catch up. I don't think it is. Even though I learned react a few years after it was in vogue (my company bet on the wrong horse), I quickly got up to speed and am just as productive now as someone that started a bit earlier.
      - duggan 9mo ago
        Not the person you asked, but my interpretation of “left in the dust” here (not a phrasing I particularly agree with) would be the same way iOS development took off in the 2010s. There was a land rush to create apps. Basic stuff like the flash light, todo lists, etc, were created and found a huge audience. Development studios were established, people became very successful out of it. I think the same thing will happen here. There is a first mover advantage. The future is not yet evenly distributed. You can still start as an iOS developer today, but the opportunity is different.
        lapcat 9mo ago
        I’m not sure your analogy is applicable here. The introduction of the App Store did not increase developer productivity per se. If anything, it decreased developer productivity, because unless you were already already a Mac developer, you had to learn a programming language you've never used, Objective-C, (now it's largely Swift, but that's still mainly used only on Apple platforms) and a brand new Apple-specific API, so a lot of your previous programming expertise became obsolete on a new platform. What the App Store did that was valuable to developers was open up a new market and bring a bunch of new potential customers, iPhone users, indeed relatively wealthy customers willing to spend money on software. What new market is brought by LLMs? They can produce as much source code as you like, but how exactly do you monetize that massive amount of source code? If anything, the value of source code and software products will drop as more is able to be produced rapidly. The only new market I see is actually the developer tool market for LLM fans, essentially a circular market of LLM developers marketing to other LLM developers. As far as the developer job market is concerned, it's painfully clear that companies are in a mass layoff mood. Whether that's due to LLMs, or whether LLMs are just the cover story, the result is the same. Developer compensation is not on the rise, unless you happen to be recruited by one of the LLM vendors themselves. My impression is that from the developer perspective, LLMs are a scheme to transfer massive amounts of wealth from developers to the LLM vendors. And you can bet the prices for access to LLMs will go up, up, up over time as developers become hooked and demand increases. To me, the whole "OpenClaw" hype looks like a crowd of gamblers at a casino, putting coins in slot machines. One thing is for certain: the house always wins.
    - palata 9mo ago
      > In the hands of a skilled dev, these things are massive force multipliers. What do you get from it? Say you produce more, do you get a higher salary? What I have seen so far is the opposite: if you don't produce more, you risk getting fired. I am not denying that LLMs make me more productive. Just saying that they don't make me more wealthy. On the other hand, they use a ton of energy at a time where we as a society should probably know better. The way I see it, we are killing the Earth because we produce too much. LLMs help us produce more, why should we be happy?
      - Schlagbohrer 9mo ago
        (Imagine me posting the graph of worker productivity in the US climbing quickly over time while pay remains flat or falls)
    - coldtea 9mo ago
      I only wish I was there when that cocky "skilled dev" is laid off.
    - mono442 9mo ago
      Using these tools comes down to basically just writing what you want in a natural language. I don't think it will be a problem to catch up if they need to.
      - jfreds 9mo ago
        Context management, plan mode versus agent mode, skills vs system prompt, all make a huge difference and all take some time to build intuition around. Not all that hard to learn, but waiting for things to settle down assumes things are going to settle down. Are they? When?
        jryan49 9mo ago
        Someone will package up all that intuition and skills and I imagine people won't have to do any of these things in future.
        habinero 9mo ago
        You wait for everyone to go broke chasing whatever, and then take their work for your own. It's not that hard to copy and paste.
        asa400 9mo ago
        That these facets of use exist at all are indicative of immature product design. These are leaked implementation details that the labs are forcing us to know because these are weak, early products and they’re still exploring the design space. The median user doesn’t want to and shouldn’t have to care about details like this. Future products in this space won’t have them and future users won’t be left in the dust by not learning them today. Python programmers aren’t left behind by not knowing malloc and free.
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
derefr 9mo ago
The negative impacts of generative AI are most sharply being felt by "creatives" (artists, writers, musicians, etc), and the consumers in those markets. If the OP here is 1. a programmer 2. who works solely with other programmers and 3. who is "on the grind", mostly just consuming non-fiction blog-post content related to software development these days, rather than paying much attention to what's currently happening to the world of movies/music/literature/etc... then it'd be pretty easy for them to not be exposed very much to anti-LLM sentiment, since that sentiment is entirely occurring in these other fields that might have no relevance to their (professional or personal) life. "Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly non-existent. The biggest kind of push-back to LLMs that we see on HN and elsewhere, is effectively just pragmatic skepticism around the effectiveness/utility/ROI of LLMs when employed for specific use-cases. Which isn't "anti-LLM sentiment" any more than skepticism around the ability of junior programmers to complete complex projects is "anti-junior-programmer sentiment." The difference between the perspectives you find in the creative professions vs in software dev, don't come down to "not getting" or "not understanding"; they really are a question of relative exposure to these pro-LLM vs anti-LLM ideas. Software dev and the creative professions are acting as entirely separate filter-bubbles of conversation here. You can end up entirely on the outside of one or the other of them by accident, and so end up entirely without exposure to one or the other set of ideas/beliefs/memes. (If you're curious, my own SO actually has this filter-bubble effect from the opposite end, so I can describe what that looks like. She only hears the negative sentiment coming from the creatives she follows, while also having to dodge endless AI slop flooding all the marketplaces and recommendation feeds she previously used to discover new media to consume. And her job is one you do with your hands and specialized domain knowledge; so none of her coworkers use AI for literally anything. [Industry magazines in her field say "AI is revolutionizing her industry" — but they mean ML, not generative AI.] She has no questions that ChatGPT could answer for her. She doesn't have any friends who are productively co-working with AI. She is 100% out-of-touch with pro-LLM sentiment.)
- remich 9mo ago
  I think this is an interesting point, my one area of disagreement is that there is no "anti-LLM sentiment" in the programming community. Sure, plenty of folks expressing skepticism or disagreement are doing so from a genuine place, but just in reading this site and a few email newsletters I get I can say that there is a non-trivial percent in the programming world who are adamantly opposed to LLMs/AI. When I see comments from people in that subset, it's quite clear that they aren't approaching it from a place of skepticism, where they could be convinced given appropriate evidence or experiences.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
moron4hire 9mo ago
Yeah, "not understanding" means they aren't engaging with the issue honestly. They go on to compare to carpentry, which is a classic sign the speaker understands neither carpentry or software development. The anti-LLM arguments aren't just "hand tools are more pure." I would even say that isn't even a majority argument. There are plenty more arguments to make about environmental and economic sustainability, correctness, safety, intellectual property rights, and whether there are actual productivity gains distinguishable from placebo. It's one of the reasons why "I am enjoying programming again" is such a frustrating genre of blog post right now. Like, I'm soooo glad we could fire up some old coal plants so you could have a little treat, Brian from Middle Management.

slfnflctd 9mo ago

> There is nothing complicated about this divide [...] You can't "not understand" I beg to differ. There are a whole lot of folks with astonishingly incomplete understanding about all the facts here who are going to continue to make things very, very complicated. Disagreement is meaningless when the relevant parties are not working from the same assumption of basic knowledge.

illusive4080 9mo ago
Bolstering your point, check out the comments in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1qy9dcs/who_has_completely_sworn_off_including_llm/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1qy9dcs/who_has_compl... There’s a lot of unwillingness to even attempt to try the tools.
- cruffle_duffle 9mo ago
  Those people are absolutely going to get left in the dust. In the hands of a skilled dev, these things are massive force multipliers.
  - skydhash 9mo ago
    It doesn’t matter how fast you run if it’s not the correct direction.
    - baq 9mo ago
      Good LLM wielders run in widening circles and get to the goal faster than good old school programmers running in a straight line
      - skydhash 9mo ago
        I still haven’t seen those mythical LLM wielders in the wild. While I’m using tools like curl, jq, cmus, calibre, openbsd,… that has been most certainly created by those old school programmers.
      - uludag 9mo ago
        I try to avoid LLMs as much as I can in my role as SWE. I'm not ideologically opposed to switching, I just don't have any pressing need. There are people I work with who are deep in the AI ecosystem and it's obvious what tools they're using It would not be uncharitable in any way to characterize their work as pure slop that doesn't work, buggy, untested adequately, etc. The moment I start to feel behind I'll gladly start adopting agentic AI tools, but as things stand now, I'm not seeing any pressing need. Comments like these make me feel like I'm being gaslit.
        kombookcha 9mo ago
        We are all constantly being gaslit. People have insane amounts of money and prestige riding on this thing paying off in such a comically huge way that it can absolutely not deliver on it in the foreseeable future. Creating a constant pressing sentiment that actually You Are Being Left Behind Get On Now Now Now is the only way they can keep inflating the balloon. If this stuff was self-evidently as useful as it's being made out to be, there would be no point in constantly trying to pressure, coax and cajole people into it. You don't need to spook people into using things that are useful, they'll do it when it makes sense. The actual use-case of LLMs is dwarfed by the massive investment bubble it has become, and it's all riding on future gains that are so hugely inflated they will leave a crater that makes the dotcom bubble look like a pothole.
      - match_condition 9mo ago
  - matsemann 9mo ago
    That's one of the sentiments I don't quite grasp, though. Why can't they just learn the tools when they're stable? So far it's been sooo many changes in workflows, basically relearn the tools every three months. It's maybe a bit more stabilized the last year, but still one could spend an enormous amount of time twiddling with various models or tools, knowledge that someone else probably could learn quicker at a later time. "Being left in the dust" would also mean it's impossible for new people / graduates to ever catch up. I don't think it is. Even though I learned react a few years after it was in vogue (my company bet on the wrong horse), I quickly got up to speed and am just as productive now as someone that started a bit earlier.
    - duggan 9mo ago
      Not the person you asked, but my interpretation of “left in the dust” here (not a phrasing I particularly agree with) would be the same way iOS development took off in the 2010s. There was a land rush to create apps. Basic stuff like the flash light, todo lists, etc, were created and found a huge audience. Development studios were established, people became very successful out of it. I think the same thing will happen here. There is a first mover advantage. The future is not yet evenly distributed. You can still start as an iOS developer today, but the opportunity is different.
      - lapcat 9mo ago
        I’m not sure your analogy is applicable here. The introduction of the App Store did not increase developer productivity per se. If anything, it decreased developer productivity, because unless you were already already a Mac developer, you had to learn a programming language you've never used, Objective-C, (now it's largely Swift, but that's still mainly used only on Apple platforms) and a brand new Apple-specific API, so a lot of your previous programming expertise became obsolete on a new platform. What the App Store did that was valuable to developers was open up a new market and bring a bunch of new potential customers, iPhone users, indeed relatively wealthy customers willing to spend money on software. What new market is brought by LLMs? They can produce as much source code as you like, but how exactly do you monetize that massive amount of source code? If anything, the value of source code and software products will drop as more is able to be produced rapidly. The only new market I see is actually the developer tool market for LLM fans, essentially a circular market of LLM developers marketing to other LLM developers. As far as the developer job market is concerned, it's painfully clear that companies are in a mass layoff mood. Whether that's due to LLMs, or whether LLMs are just the cover story, the result is the same. Developer compensation is not on the rise, unless you happen to be recruited by one of the LLM vendors themselves. My impression is that from the developer perspective, LLMs are a scheme to transfer massive amounts of wealth from developers to the LLM vendors. And you can bet the prices for access to LLMs will go up, up, up over time as developers become hooked and demand increases. To me, the whole "OpenClaw" hype looks like a crowd of gamblers at a casino, putting coins in slot machines. One thing is for certain: the house always wins.
  - palata 9mo ago
    > In the hands of a skilled dev, these things are massive force multipliers. What do you get from it? Say you produce more, do you get a higher salary? What I have seen so far is the opposite: if you don't produce more, you risk getting fired. I am not denying that LLMs make me more productive. Just saying that they don't make me more wealthy. On the other hand, they use a ton of energy at a time where we as a society should probably know better. The way I see it, we are killing the Earth because we produce too much. LLMs help us produce more, why should we be happy?
    - Schlagbohrer 9mo ago
      (Imagine me posting the graph of worker productivity in the US climbing quickly over time while pay remains flat or falls)
  - coldtea 9mo ago
    I only wish I was there when that cocky "skilled dev" is laid off.
  - mono442 9mo ago
    Using these tools comes down to basically just writing what you want in a natural language. I don't think it will be a problem to catch up if they need to.
    - jfreds 9mo ago
      Context management, plan mode versus agent mode, skills vs system prompt, all make a huge difference and all take some time to build intuition around. Not all that hard to learn, but waiting for things to settle down assumes things are going to settle down. Are they? When?
      - jryan49 9mo ago
        Someone will package up all that intuition and skills and I imagine people won't have to do any of these things in future.
      - habinero 9mo ago
        You wait for everyone to go broke chasing whatever, and then take their work for your own. It's not that hard to copy and paste.
      - asa400 9mo ago
        That these facets of use exist at all are indicative of immature product design. These are leaked implementation details that the labs are forcing us to know because these are weak, early products and they’re still exploring the design space. The median user doesn’t want to and shouldn’t have to care about details like this. Future products in this space won’t have them and future users won’t be left in the dust by not learning them today. Python programmers aren’t left behind by not knowing malloc and free.
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]

derefr 9mo ago

The negative impacts of generative AI are most sharply being felt by "creatives" (artists, writers, musicians, etc), and the consumers in those markets. If the OP here is 1. a programmer 2. who works solely with other programmers and 3. who is "on the grind", mostly just consuming non-fiction blog-post content related to software development these days, rather than paying much attention to what's currently happening to the world of movies/music/literature/etc... then it'd be pretty easy for them to not be exposed very much to anti-LLM sentiment, since that sentiment is entirely occurring in these other fields that might have no relevance to their (professional or personal) life. "Anti-LLM sentiment" within software development is nearly non-existent. The biggest kind of push-back to LLMs that we see on HN and elsewhere, is effectively just pragmatic skepticism around the effectiveness/utility/ROI of LLMs when employed for specific use-cases. Which isn't "anti-LLM sentiment" any more than skepticism around the ability of junior programmers to complete complex projects is "anti-junior-programmer sentiment." The difference between the perspectives you find in the creative professions vs in software dev, don't come down to "not getting" or "not understanding"; they really are a question of relative exposure to these pro-LLM vs anti-LLM ideas. Software dev and the creative professions are acting as entirely separate filter-bubbles of conversation here. You can end up entirely on the outside of one or the other of them by accident, and so end up entirely without exposure to one or the other set of ideas/beliefs/memes. (If you're curious, my own SO actually has this filter-bubble effect from the opposite end, so I can describe what that looks like. She only hears the negative sentiment coming from the creatives she follows, while also having to dodge endless AI slop flooding all the marketplaces and recommendation feeds she previously used to discover new media to consume. And her job is one you do with your hands and specialized domain knowledge; so none of her coworkers use AI for literally anything. [Industry magazines in her field say "AI is revolutionizing her industry" — but they mean ML, not generative AI.] She has no questions that ChatGPT could answer for her. She doesn't have any friends who are productively co-working with AI. She is 100% out-of-touch with pro-LLM sentiment.)

remich 9mo ago
I think this is an interesting point, my one area of disagreement is that there is no "anti-LLM sentiment" in the programming community. Sure, plenty of folks expressing skepticism or disagreement are doing so from a genuine place, but just in reading this site and a few email newsletters I get I can say that there is a non-trivial percent in the programming world who are adamantly opposed to LLMs/AI. When I see comments from people in that subset, it's quite clear that they aren't approaching it from a place of skepticism, where they could be convinced given appropriate evidence or experiences.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

moron4hire 9mo ago

Yeah, "not understanding" means they aren't engaging with the issue honestly. They go on to compare to carpentry, which is a classic sign the speaker understands neither carpentry or software development. The anti-LLM arguments aren't just "hand tools are more pure." I would even say that isn't even a majority argument. There are plenty more arguments to make about environmental and economic sustainability, correctness, safety, intellectual property rights, and whether there are actual productivity gains distinguishable from placebo. It's one of the reasons why "I am enjoying programming again" is such a frustrating genre of blog post right now. Like, I'm soooo glad we could fire up some old coal plants so you could have a little treat, Brian from Middle Management.