Nolan Lawson
I held out for a long time, but I finally started using LLMs in my regular coding work. I couldn't deny the utility of tools like Claude any longer, when it can do in 2 minutes what would take me an hour.
There are problems: hallucinations, verbosity, bad/unperformant/inaccessible code. I have to correct it a lot. That's OK.
The main problem I find is that it's sucked a lot of the fun out of coding for me. It's like I've been pushed into a management role when I just wanted to stay a coder.
Eugen Rochko
@nolan @baldur I see it as a continuation of the blockchain and NFT phenomenon. When I visited San Francisco, ads for LLMs were everywhere. It makes you doubt yourself. But I believe it is a bubble, perpetuated by those standing to profit from LLMs. We’re lucky that the fediverse by large is outside that bubble.
Nolan Lawson
I'm familiar with all the arguments against GenAI, and I'm a big fan of authors like @baldur whose excellent book, The Intelligence Illusion, I've read twice. It's highly recommended. https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/
I have a degree in computational linguistics, and that's partly why I was so skeptical of these tools for so long. I still am! But more and more I felt like the world was moving on without me. To this day I feel deeply conflicted.
Nolan Lawson
Of course, this is a choice: I *could* choose not to use LLMs. When I ride my bike, I don't bemoan the fact that a car could do it faster – the goal is exercise.
But nobody's paying me to ride my bike. If I were a delivery driver, it'd be pretty unprofessional to show up an hour late with a cold pizza just because I like biking.
With LLMs, it almost feels like malpractice *not* to use them at this point. I can't justify taking ~3x longer to ship a feature just because I don't enjoy using them.
Nolan Lawson
The other issue of course is that I'm not learning as much when I use LLMs. Even if it's an iterative, back-and-forth process, the tool is doing ~80% of the thinking for me.
It feels like I either need to spend more time learning outside of coding, or just accept at some level that I'm "cashing in my chips" and relying on ~20 years of actual coding experience.
Either way, I feel less excited by these tools than defeated. They're incredible magic wands, but I kind of liked doing my own sorcery?
Andy Warburton ❌❌❌
@Gargron @nolan @baldur I was talking to colleagues about this after listening to our earnings call. Investors were clearly pushing the CEO around AI. I imagine it’s mostly because they all have money in NVDA, OpenAI etc and want to keep that growing!
Nolan Lawson
@baldur These are good points, thank you. Maybe that's the heart of my inner conflict: these tools "work" (for some definition of "work") but they are inherently dehumanizing and insulting. They make a mockery of my ~20 years of hard-won expertise.
Ezra Klein in his podcast once said that the core "message" of GenAI (in the McLuhan sense) is: "You are derivative." I totally agree with that.
Aral Balkan
@nolan @baldur They’re also trained on your ~20 years of hard-won experience (as well as everyone else’s). They’re literally selling you back to yourself after having stolen you in the first place. The only thing that could make it any more insulting is if JD Vance told you you should thank them for it.
Baldur Bjarnason
@nolan What most people don't get is that critics like me are the optimists in this scenario. A future where the fundamental issues with LLMs will lead them to causing more problems than they solve, resulting in much of it being rolled back after the bubble pops is the least bad future for dev as a career.
Because monitoring automation is a low-wage activity and an industry dominated by that kind of automation requires much much fewer workers than one that's fundamentally built on expertise.
Baldur Bjarnason
@nolan I'm sure you're being bombarded with replies
But, brushing past the issues with the software industry that are enabling problematic use of LLMs: it's understandable that coders feel conflicted about them, even if you assume the tech works as promised, because you've just changed jobs
You've gone from thoughtful problem-solving to babysitting
Monitoring automation will never be an engaging activity
And, in the long run, a babysitter gets paid much less an expert
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