It’s anyone’s prerogative to continue to advocate for the horse and buggy over the automobile, but most people won’t bother to take the discussion seriously.
These two sentences appear to be at odds with one another.
"Guys this debate is so stupid. Every serious inquiry shows productivity gains when we take away all senses, jack workers into the matrix and feed them a steady diet of speed intravenously. This put debate to rest. Now we are post-debate"
Something can increase productivity and still not be good.
https://www.fightforthehuman.com/are-developers-slowed-down-...
AI is about destroying working-class jobs so that corporations and the owning class can profit. It's not about writing code or summarizing articles. Those are just things workers can do with it. That's not what it's actually for. Its purpose is to reduce payroll costs for companies by replacing workers.
They were not against technology; they were against technology that their destroyed jobs. If we had followed what they wanted, we'd still be in a semi pre industrial artisnal economy, and the worse off for it.
You can enable virtually free test driven development. Write the test names down and let the LLM implement them for you. You save 50% of your time and you get to go to town on implementation and or optimizations.
You can have the LLM take the non-tech-counterparts description of a bug and have it point you at precise lines of code to investigate rather than grepping around a codebase you might not know well.
You can onboard to new languages, frameworks, repositories extremely fast by having a partner (the LLM) explain implementation patterns and approaches on demand! You don't even need to talk to another human being! Get your questions answered in seconds and start coding!
You can rapidly prototype. You can get immediate code reviews. You can rubber duck. You can visualize business/logic flows and code branching to better understand existing implementations. You can even have the LLM write an implementation plan for you then write the code yourself!
If you cant find a way to write more code with LLMs, its either an imagination or skill issue.
That's assuming that it writes good tests, and that you don't care to take the time to verify the tests it wrote, no?
I think the reason this discussion keeps coming up is that the people who are getting a lot out of these tools are people who are, at best, the software-equivalent of assembly-line workers. If something can be easily understood by passively reading it then it probably isn't complicated or novel and therefore it's not surprising a pseudorandom bullshit generator can do it for you; all it lacks is a unit testing system which can verify that its interpretation of the problem-statement matches the interpretation which would be most obvious to a human and that is evidently not a solved problem thus far.
If the hardest part of your job is understanding code written by other people and even code written by yourself in the distant past, then LLMs are of literal use because the problem they solve was never a significant bottleneck and in fact their "solution" only serves to pump a higher volume of fluid through the neck of the proverbial bottle.
It's the difference between reading somebody's paper in a mathematical journal to understand how they came to the conclusion they are presenting, and merely using the identity they have proven on faith. If all that mattered was to perform some calculation based on their work then its clear which approach will get more work done in less time but if you don't take it for granted that everything in the journal is correct or if you want to be able to further develop ideas based upon their proof then you have to spend a few days or even weeks trying to understand how each step leads to its successor.
It's also why i hate the old adage about not reinventing wheels, it promotes ignorance by asserting that education itself is ignorance.
But, I like it, I’ve reinvented many wheels in my work and it’s benefited me greatly. So I will reinvent this particular wheel as well…
That being said I noticed that the more opinionated a language/framework/library is, the worse off one is using LLMs.
I was surprised by this, but then I put a particularly fishy line into GitHub's search box. What I saw were piles upon piles of bad practices and incorrect usages. There's a lot of bad code there and LLMs are learning from it.
As a simple example, accidentally inverting feature flag logic will not cause tests to fail if the new behavior you're guarding does not actually break existing tests. I and very senior developers I know have occasionally made this mistake and the "thinking" models are very good at catching issues like this, especially when prompted with a list of error categories to look for. Writing an LLM prompt for an issue class is much easier than a compiler plugin or static analysis pass, and in many cases works better because it can infer intent from comments and symbol names. False positives on issues can be annoying but aren't risky, and also can be a useful signal that the code is not written in a clear way.
Software crafting is so much more than merely writing code. There's a significant amount of reading code that goes into it. Code written by you. Code written by someone else. Someone else's code that you butchered with your edits, your own code butchered by someone else, and everything intertwined in between. Code that can't easily be explained by looking at it - sometimes you have to find relevant PRs, tickets, documentation, related online communication, some loosely-related code sitting someplace else, etc.
LLMs absolutely can help you read code, just as they are very capable of helping someone study a book or an academic paper. Denying that fact simply is ignorance. Of course, LLMs are absolutely capable of leading you in the wrong direction, confusing you, and giving you incorrect facts, even when you're studying text in plain English, just like it's possible to end up at the bottom of a lake when driving a car. Everyone needs to exercise caution and "know what the fuck they're doing" when using a model. But calling LLMs "bullshit generators" and "magic 8 balls" is so stupid. Sure, if you use it to perform bullshit stuff, it will generate nothing but bullshit.
