5 ms·

Feels like a false equivalency. It's just my experience, but I've completely ignored crypto and the metaverse, and I don't get the sense I'm missing out on much

Feels like a false equivalency. It's just my experience, but I've completely ignored crypto and the metaverse, and I don't get the sense I'm missing out on much. In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. Transformative for the better? Time will tell I suppose, but I'm really enjoying it so far.

lapcat 6mo ago
> Transformative for the better? Time will tell I suppose That's the point of the blog post. If you can't even say right now whether it's for the better, then there's no reason to rush in.
- nehal3m 6mo ago
  And conversely if it is, then there is no point to getting in early since the whole point is to externalize knowledge and experience
- colejohnson66 6mo ago
  I read OP as saying it is transformative, at least for them. Whether it's transformative for society is left to be decided.
xondono 6mo ago
This depends very much on your line of work. As a freelancer I do a bit of everything, and I’ve seen places where LLM breezes through and gets me what I want quickly, and times where using an LLM was a complete waste of time.
- pennomi 6mo ago
  For sure. The more specialized or obscure of things you have to do, the less LLMs help you. Building a simple marketing website? Probably don’t waste your time - an LLM will probably be faster. Designing a new SLAM algorithm? Probably LLMs will spin around in circles helplessly. That being said, that was my experience several years ago… maybe state of the art has changed in the computer vision space.
  - monsieurbanana 6mo ago
    Specialized is probably not the word I'd use, because llms are generally useful to understand more specialized / obscure topics. For example I've never randomly heard people talking about the dicom standard, llms have no trouble with it.
    - aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
      > llms are generally useful to understand more specialized / obscure topics A very simple kind of query that in my experiences causes problems to many current LLMs is: "Write {something obscure} in the Wolfram programming language."
      - AlotOfReading 6mo ago
        One tendency I've noticed is that LLMs struggle with creativity. If you give them a language with extremely powerful and expressive features, they'll often fail to use them to simplify other problems the way a good programmer does. Wolfram is a language essentially designed around that. I wasn't able to replicate in my own testing though. Do you know if it also fails for "mathematica" code? There's much more text online about that.
        aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
        > Do you know if it also fails for "mathematica" code? My experience concerning using "Mathematica" instead of "Wolfram" in AI tasks is similar.
    - phil21 6mo ago
      I think there is a sweet spot for the training(?) on these LLMs where there is basically only "professional" level documentation and chatter, without the layman stuff being picked up from reddit and github/etc. I was looking at trying to remember/figure out some obscure hardware communication protocol to figure out enumeration of a hardware bus on some servers. Feeding codex a few RFC URLs and other such information, plus telling it to search the internet resulted in extremely rapid progress vs. having to wade through 500 pages of technical jargon and specification documents. I'm sure if I was extending the spec to a 3.0 version in hardware or something it would not be useful, but for someone who just needs to understand the basics to get some quick tooling stood up it was close to magic.
- peacebeard 6mo ago
  Honestly I think this is the primary explanation for why there is so much disagreement on if LLMs are useful or not. If you leave out the more motivated arguments in particular.
- muskstinks 6mo ago
  But this learning is also value. Without playing around with it, you wouldn't know when to use an LLM and when not.
  - daveguy 6mo ago
    But the models change every 3-6 months. What's the use of learning what they can and can't do when what they can and can't do changes so frequently?
    - joquarky 6mo ago
      If you had to hold on for dear life during the ~2014-2017 JavaScript framework chaos, then 3-6 months is peanuts. This is an industry that requires continuous learning.
    - christofosho 6mo ago
      Some subscriptions offer "unlimited tokens" for certain models. i.e. GitHub co-pilot can be unlimited for GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 (and, actually, GPT-5 mini!). So: I spent some time with those models to see what level of scaffolding and breaking things down (hand holding) was required to get them to complete a task. Why would I do that? Well, I wanted to understand more deeply how differences in my prompting might impact the outcomes of the model. I also wanted to get generally better at writing prompts. And of course, improving at controlling context and seeing how models can go off the rails. Just by being better at understanding these patterns, I feel more confident in general at when and how to use LLMs in my daily work. I think, in general, understanding not only that earlier models are weaker, but also _how_ they are weaker, is useful in its own right. It gives you an extra tool to use. I will say, the biggest findings for "weaknesses" I've found are in training data. If you're keeping your libraries up-to-date, and you're using newer methods or functionality from those libraries, AI will constantly fail to identify with those new things. For example, Zod v4 came out recently and the older models absolutely fail to understand that it uses some different syntax and methods under the hood. Jest now supports `using` syntax for its spyOn method, and models just can't figure it out. Even with system prompts and telling them directly, the existing training data is just too overpowering.
datsci_est_2015 6mo ago
> In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. Feels like a false dichotomy. Have I become faster with LLMs? Yes, maybe. Is it 10x or 1000x or 10,000x? Definitely not. I think actually in the past I would have leaned more on senior developers, books, stack overflow etc. but now I can be much more independent and proactive. LLM-based tools are a wide spectrum, and to argue that the whole spectrum is worth exploring because one sliver of it has definite utility is a bit wonky. Kind of like saying $SHITCOIN is worth investing in because $BITCOIN mooned as a speculative asset: - I’m bullish on LLMs chat interfaces replacing StackOverflow and O’Reilly - I could not be more bearish on Agents automating software engineering Feel like we’re back at Adobe Dreameaver release and everyone is claiming that web development jobs are dead.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > Have I become faster with LLMs? Yes, maybe. The question isn’t if you’ve improved. It’s if the path you took to getting to your current improvement could have been shortcut with the benefit of hindsight. Given the number of dead ends we’ve traversed, the answer almost certainly is yes.
- hungryhobbit 6mo ago
  >Feel like we’re back at Adobe Dreameaver release and everyone is claiming that web development jobs are dead I truly believe so much of the anti-AI sentiment is the same as the Luddites. They're often used as a meme now, but they were very real people, faced with a real and present risk to their livelihoods. They acted out of fear, but not just irrational fear. AI is the same: it's unquestionably (to anyone evaluating it fairly) a huge boost to productivity ... and also, unquestionably, a threat to programmer jobs. Maybe the OP is right about waiting, but to me whenever new tech is disrupting jobs, that seems like the best time to learn it. If you don't, it's not just FOMO as the author suggests ... it's failing to keep up on the skills that keep you employed.
  - toraway 6mo ago
newsoftheday 6mo ago
> In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation It may have reduced the time to an implementation, based on my experiences I sincerely doubt the veracity of applying the adjective "working".
locknitpicker 6mo ago
> Feels like a false equivalency. It's clearly a textbook example of survivorship bias. In the 90s the same argument was directed at this new thing called the internet, and those who placed a bet on it being a fad ended up being forgotten by history. It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to established sites such as Stack Overflow to get a glimpse of the radical impact. Even in social media we started to see the dead internet theory put to practice in real time. And coding is the lowest of low hanging fruits.
- disgruntledphd2 6mo ago
  > It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to established sites such as Stack Overflow to get a glimpse of the radical impact. Even in social media we started to see the dead internet theory put to practice in real time. It's worth noting that SO was declining well before ChatGPT launched. It seems more likely that the decline of SO was more driven by Google ranking changes to prioritise websites that served Google ads. Certainly I remember having to go down a few results to get SO results for a while, even when the top results were just copypasta from SO.
  - locknitpicker 6mo ago
    > It's worth noting that SO was declining well before ChatGPT launched. It seems more likely that the decline of SO was more driven by Google ranking changes to prioritise websites that served Google ads. I don't think that's it. SO was the go-to page for troubleshooting, whose traffic was not exactly originating from web search. Also, the LLM-correlated drop in traffic is also reported by search engines. Stack Overflow just so happens to be a specialized service with a very specialized audience whose demand is perfectly dominated by LLM chatbots.
    - disgruntledphd2 6mo ago
      I mean the first decline happened well before ChatGPT so it can't just be that.
ErroneousBosh 6mo ago
> In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. I can't really agree. I've never seen anything from an LLM that I would consider even helpful, never mind transformative. How are you supposed to use them?
- kaffekaka 6mo ago
  Is this seriously so? Have you never seen anything helpful from an LLM? That seems such a black and white statement that I get confused. I am conservative regarding AI driven coding but I still see tremendous value. It makes me want to ask you: do you ever see helpful things from your colleagues at all?
  - ErroneousBosh 6mo ago
    > Is this seriously so? Have you never seen anything helpful from an LLM? No, not at all. I may be using it wrong. I put in "write me a library that decodes network packets in <format I'm working with>" and it had no idea where to start. What part of it is it supposed to do? I don't want to do any more typing than I have to.
    - linhns 6mo ago
      Well, if you ask it to write a library at the start, it's likely it will not do that well. Start small, spoon feed some examples.
      - xigoi 6mo ago
        If you have to put in this much effort, why not just write it yourself?
        HDThoreaun 6mo ago
        When you write a library the first step is always designing it. LLMs dont get rid of that step, they get rid of the next step where you implement your design.
spelunker 6mo ago
Crypto and the Metaverse were solutions in search of a problem. LLMs kind of felt like that until tooling arrived that enabled doing a lot more than copying + pasting chat conversations. Sure, maybe crypto changed some lives, but an entire industry? I think ALL of software dev is going under a transformation and I think we're past the point of "wait it out" IMO. Or I'm wrong, but right I'm being paid to develop a new skill professionally. Maybe the skill ends up not being useful - ok, back to writing code the old way then.

lapcat 6mo ago

> Transformative for the better? Time will tell I suppose That's the point of the blog post. If you can't even say right now whether it's for the better, then there's no reason to rush in.

nehal3m 6mo ago
And conversely if it is, then there is no point to getting in early since the whole point is to externalize knowledge and experience
colejohnson66 6mo ago
I read OP as saying it is transformative, at least for them. Whether it's transformative for society is left to be decided.

xondono 6mo ago

This depends very much on your line of work. As a freelancer I do a bit of everything, and I’ve seen places where LLM breezes through and gets me what I want quickly, and times where using an LLM was a complete waste of time.

pennomi 6mo ago
For sure. The more specialized or obscure of things you have to do, the less LLMs help you. Building a simple marketing website? Probably don’t waste your time - an LLM will probably be faster. Designing a new SLAM algorithm? Probably LLMs will spin around in circles helplessly. That being said, that was my experience several years ago… maybe state of the art has changed in the computer vision space.
- monsieurbanana 6mo ago
  Specialized is probably not the word I'd use, because llms are generally useful to understand more specialized / obscure topics. For example I've never randomly heard people talking about the dicom standard, llms have no trouble with it.
  - aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
    > llms are generally useful to understand more specialized / obscure topics A very simple kind of query that in my experiences causes problems to many current LLMs is: "Write {something obscure} in the Wolfram programming language."
    - AlotOfReading 6mo ago
      One tendency I've noticed is that LLMs struggle with creativity. If you give them a language with extremely powerful and expressive features, they'll often fail to use them to simplify other problems the way a good programmer does. Wolfram is a language essentially designed around that. I wasn't able to replicate in my own testing though. Do you know if it also fails for "mathematica" code? There's much more text online about that.
      - aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
        > Do you know if it also fails for "mathematica" code? My experience concerning using "Mathematica" instead of "Wolfram" in AI tasks is similar.
  - phil21 6mo ago
    I think there is a sweet spot for the training(?) on these LLMs where there is basically only "professional" level documentation and chatter, without the layman stuff being picked up from reddit and github/etc. I was looking at trying to remember/figure out some obscure hardware communication protocol to figure out enumeration of a hardware bus on some servers. Feeding codex a few RFC URLs and other such information, plus telling it to search the internet resulted in extremely rapid progress vs. having to wade through 500 pages of technical jargon and specification documents. I'm sure if I was extending the spec to a 3.0 version in hardware or something it would not be useful, but for someone who just needs to understand the basics to get some quick tooling stood up it was close to magic.
peacebeard 6mo ago
Honestly I think this is the primary explanation for why there is so much disagreement on if LLMs are useful or not. If you leave out the more motivated arguments in particular.
muskstinks 6mo ago
But this learning is also value. Without playing around with it, you wouldn't know when to use an LLM and when not.
- daveguy 6mo ago
  But the models change every 3-6 months. What's the use of learning what they can and can't do when what they can and can't do changes so frequently?
  - joquarky 6mo ago
    If you had to hold on for dear life during the ~2014-2017 JavaScript framework chaos, then 3-6 months is peanuts. This is an industry that requires continuous learning.
  - christofosho 6mo ago
    Some subscriptions offer "unlimited tokens" for certain models. i.e. GitHub co-pilot can be unlimited for GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 (and, actually, GPT-5 mini!). So: I spent some time with those models to see what level of scaffolding and breaking things down (hand holding) was required to get them to complete a task. Why would I do that? Well, I wanted to understand more deeply how differences in my prompting might impact the outcomes of the model. I also wanted to get generally better at writing prompts. And of course, improving at controlling context and seeing how models can go off the rails. Just by being better at understanding these patterns, I feel more confident in general at when and how to use LLMs in my daily work. I think, in general, understanding not only that earlier models are weaker, but also _how_ they are weaker, is useful in its own right. It gives you an extra tool to use. I will say, the biggest findings for "weaknesses" I've found are in training data. If you're keeping your libraries up-to-date, and you're using newer methods or functionality from those libraries, AI will constantly fail to identify with those new things. For example, Zod v4 came out recently and the older models absolutely fail to understand that it uses some different syntax and methods under the hood. Jest now supports `using` syntax for its spyOn method, and models just can't figure it out. Even with system prompts and telling them directly, the existing training data is just too overpowering.

datsci_est_2015 6mo ago

> In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. Feels like a false dichotomy. Have I become faster with LLMs? Yes, maybe. Is it 10x or 1000x or 10,000x? Definitely not. I think actually in the past I would have leaned more on senior developers, books, stack overflow etc. but now I can be much more independent and proactive. LLM-based tools are a wide spectrum, and to argue that the whole spectrum is worth exploring because one sliver of it has definite utility is a bit wonky. Kind of like saying $SHITCOIN is worth investing in because $BITCOIN mooned as a speculative asset: - I’m bullish on LLMs chat interfaces replacing StackOverflow and O’Reilly - I could not be more bearish on Agents automating software engineering Feel like we’re back at Adobe Dreameaver release and everyone is claiming that web development jobs are dead.

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> Have I become faster with LLMs? Yes, maybe. The question isn’t if you’ve improved. It’s if the path you took to getting to your current improvement could have been shortcut with the benefit of hindsight. Given the number of dead ends we’ve traversed, the answer almost certainly is yes.
hungryhobbit 6mo ago
>Feel like we’re back at Adobe Dreameaver release and everyone is claiming that web development jobs are dead I truly believe so much of the anti-AI sentiment is the same as the Luddites. They're often used as a meme now, but they were very real people, faced with a real and present risk to their livelihoods. They acted out of fear, but not just irrational fear. AI is the same: it's unquestionably (to anyone evaluating it fairly) a huge boost to productivity ... and also, unquestionably, a threat to programmer jobs. Maybe the OP is right about waiting, but to me whenever new tech is disrupting jobs, that seems like the best time to learn it. If you don't, it's not just FOMO as the author suggests ... it's failing to keep up on the skills that keep you employed.
- toraway 6mo ago

newsoftheday 6mo ago

> In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation It may have reduced the time to an implementation, based on my experiences I sincerely doubt the veracity of applying the adjective "working".

locknitpicker 6mo ago

> Feels like a false equivalency. It's clearly a textbook example of survivorship bias. In the 90s the same argument was directed at this new thing called the internet, and those who placed a bet on it being a fad ended up being forgotten by history. It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to established sites such as Stack Overflow to get a glimpse of the radical impact. Even in social media we started to see the dead internet theory put to practice in real time. And coding is the lowest of low hanging fruits.

disgruntledphd2 6mo ago
> It's rather obvious that this AI thing is a transformative event in world history, perhaps more critical than the advent of the internet. Take a look at traffic to established sites such as Stack Overflow to get a glimpse of the radical impact. Even in social media we started to see the dead internet theory put to practice in real time. It's worth noting that SO was declining well before ChatGPT launched. It seems more likely that the decline of SO was more driven by Google ranking changes to prioritise websites that served Google ads. Certainly I remember having to go down a few results to get SO results for a while, even when the top results were just copypasta from SO.
- locknitpicker 6mo ago
  > It's worth noting that SO was declining well before ChatGPT launched. It seems more likely that the decline of SO was more driven by Google ranking changes to prioritise websites that served Google ads. I don't think that's it. SO was the go-to page for troubleshooting, whose traffic was not exactly originating from web search. Also, the LLM-correlated drop in traffic is also reported by search engines. Stack Overflow just so happens to be a specialized service with a very specialized audience whose demand is perfectly dominated by LLM chatbots.
  - disgruntledphd2 6mo ago
    I mean the first decline happened well before ChatGPT so it can't just be that.

ErroneousBosh 6mo ago

> In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life. I can't really agree. I've never seen anything from an LLM that I would consider even helpful, never mind transformative. How are you supposed to use them?

kaffekaka 6mo ago
Is this seriously so? Have you never seen anything helpful from an LLM? That seems such a black and white statement that I get confused. I am conservative regarding AI driven coding but I still see tremendous value. It makes me want to ask you: do you ever see helpful things from your colleagues at all?
- ErroneousBosh 6mo ago
  > Is this seriously so? Have you never seen anything helpful from an LLM? No, not at all. I may be using it wrong. I put in "write me a library that decodes network packets in <format I'm working with>" and it had no idea where to start. What part of it is it supposed to do? I don't want to do any more typing than I have to.
  - linhns 6mo ago
    Well, if you ask it to write a library at the start, it's likely it will not do that well. Start small, spoon feed some examples.
    - xigoi 6mo ago
      If you have to put in this much effort, why not just write it yourself?
      - HDThoreaun 6mo ago
        When you write a library the first step is always designing it. LLMs dont get rid of that step, they get rid of the next step where you implement your design.

spelunker 6mo ago

Crypto and the Metaverse were solutions in search of a problem. LLMs kind of felt like that until tooling arrived that enabled doing a lot more than copying + pasting chat conversations. Sure, maybe crypto changed some lives, but an entire industry? I think ALL of software dev is going under a transformation and I think we're past the point of "wait it out" IMO. Or I'm wrong, but right I'm being paid to develop a new skill professionally. Maybe the skill ends up not being useful - ok, back to writing code the old way then.