Skilled and dedicated people and an organization dedicated to maintaining a consistent level of security. Maintaining both of these long term seems to be the challenge for many companies.
All the better, I've long suspected that these companies are collecting this data and selling some portion of it. Having this category of business entirely disappear sounds like a solid win to me.
Agreed, there may be people working with their LLM tool to learn something new. In my experience this isn’t the way these tools are marketed, from where I sit it looks like this is being discouraged. If you aren’t really learning anything then all you get at the end is the product. For a certain type of person this is just not enough.
I bet people generated solutions end up significantly different from AI generated solutions. People learn more about the problem as they work it through and they don’t always end up with the thing they were imagining when they started.
> I bet people generated solutions end up significantly different from AI generated solutions. People learn more about the problem as they work it through and they don’t always end up with the thing they were imagining when they started.
Exactly!
And to be clear, you can learn a ton from LLMs. An expert teacher with infinite patience -- what an amazing thing. But there's a different kind of learning that only happens with practice, and that's what you don't get when a computer does the thinking.
Your brain is hardwired to find shortcuts. Once you have an LLM at your disposal, it'll be real hard to abstain from using it to do the hard bit.
Someone on Twitter put it well: using an LLM to learn is like using a forklift to lift weights in the gym. Yes, action is happening but the point of going to the gym is not to ensure weights get displaced up and down.
That's a bizarre analogy. If you're actually committed to learning (vs having the LLM spit out code you don't read), using an LLM as a teacher is more like working out using weight machines vs dumbbells. Just two different methods of arriving at the same destination, with different pros and cons.
I’m sure there is some of that, people looking back at years of learning a skill, maybe even turning it into a productive career, and being upset that anyone can pay for an LLM tool and get output they believe is comparable.
In my opinion, that’s not the whole thing and the article and the parent post touch on this. The part about the process of struggling to get your mind to understand new ideas and new ways of doing things, the satisfaction in putting together a solution that fits in just right and gets the job done. The feeling of goals accomplished and having improved oneself. These are things that are still out there, and the work is still valuable.
The difference, for me, is this constant background conversation that seems to be saying “this is worthless” and “you’re wasting your time”. I don’t think this is true but it’s hard to hear. Depending on where a person is in life, it can hit pretty hard.
Everyone addresses this differently, but for me, I always grated at people whose knowledge of esoteric patterns and language features was their whole identity.
It feels to me like suffering through programming built that knowledge, and so that knowledge was an indicator of taste and experience and persistence, but then it became cosplayed as people sought the knowledge itself in "patterns", or "features" rather than the experience of just building things.
The LLM thing just cuts the same way. It's probably not using your favorite pattern or language feature, or maybe it automatically is, but either way your annoyance is about it stems from the quality signals being discounted: You can't really assert experience through that kind of knowledge anymore if people are providing value while stepping around your hard-won lessons and using your favorite pattern or feature through LLMs. You saw this in the linkedin posts early on: All the programming influencers asserted their value by saying they wrote better quality code than the code the LLM wrote.
This is worst for junior devs. Making a clean, well factored codebase as a portfolio project was a near-instant win on the job market because it meant this person either suffered like you did, or they listened to seniors and walked the walk. That signal is absolutely gone now.
What a great comment, I wanted to quote my favorite parts but would just have to quote the whole thing. The “I suffered so you must too otherwise you’re unworthy” is so on point. The people whose identity is tied to gatekeeping programming are the worst and now those gates are crumbling and they can’t stand it.
> people whose knowledge of esoteric patterns and language features was their whole identity
I came across too many of those people in my career and I can't say I'm sad that LLM are taking this away from them.
The worst were the ones acting as gatekeepers during hiring process. You could have built S3 and they'd still look down on you because you didn't knew about some weird feature in Java.
For sure, there have always been obnoxious people trying to gatekeep who they feel met their arbitrary bar of "good developer" with trivia or a command of arcane details. It makes the work harder and it discourages talented people who are new to the field, like junior devs.
Maybe LLM tooling can help people demystify some of that. I think that would be a good thing.
In my experience, LLM tools are not infallible and I've seen them introduce changes in one place that causes defects in two or three other places. They write code that I find difficult to read and that can make diagnosing these bugs harder than it needs to be. People have brought me code that LLM tools have written because they are surprised that it doesn't work and are wondering if somehow they, the human, just doesn't understand something.
Maybe this is just another bump and these tools will continue to improve. Until these things aren't a problem. As it stands today, I think there's still a place for a people in commercial software development.
NGL, its a little annoying and disheartening that many can now partially build with an LLM tool what I spent so many years learning. It does not cover all cases, but there is an element of this.
I’m not sure how this is responding to the post… I think the author is going for something different, and that it’s not necessarily about getting things done quickly or implementing every feature on their list. More about the journey and learning along the way, feeling ownership of their project, etc.
Right now the AI companies are selling their product at a loss to try to get us hooked. I think it's fair to describe the current situation as "unreasonably cheap", though free is a bit of a stretch.
It will be interesting to see what happens when human developers become cheaper than token maxxing AIs.
Interesting because by then codebases might have become so complex that these can no longer be modified, maintained nor understood by humans, so replacing AI with HI (human intelligence) will simply no longer possible.
That then represents a certain vendor lock-in or Mafia stand off: either keeping paying or have all the code go up in smoke.
Certainly not everyone will be facing this dilemma, but it certainly isn’t sci-fi considering the track-record of big tech.
Will the LLM tools be able to maintain this pile of code either? In my experience there seems to be some complexity maximum to a project that, once reached, the LLM tooling doesn't seem able to manage it either.
This is why I say that those who say "AI is a tool" don't quite have it right. AI is a service. Your power saw doesn't cut the wood for you while you go do something else, and then ask if you would like it planed next.
It depends on whether you are using the LLM as a) an advanced autocomplete; b) a chatbot/query interface; or c) an agent. Only the latter goes and does things for you.
It's also confusing that the term AI has become synonymous with LLMs as it covers other things like text prediction/correction.
So AI can be a tool or a service depending on how you are using it and what you are using it for.
Personally, I'm not in love with the idea that something harmful to children is totally okay for adults. If social media is that corrosive to young people, maybe we should take a look at that and make it less corrosive for everyone.
Some kind of "child lock" on the device makes more sense to me; a parent or whatever can child lock the device before handing it off, no need to collect images of the child in question and store them in some big pile at a private company.
This kind of thinking just leads to an obvious analogy: alcohol. Alcohol is harmful to children and adults. Yet when the United States tried Prohibition it was rolled back. It turns out that people want to do things harmful to themselves.
I have children and I am very much against the implementation of age verification in the US. It strikes me as a thinly veiled attempt to collect event more data about people. I'm skeptical that it will prevent children from accessing these services.
sure sure but just don't give kids internet access problem solved. All these problems are because we insist on giving kids internet access then try to ban them from internet sites. Its all just very stupid.
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