people who were a really good programmers before will probably use it responsibly for a while, until their skills inevitably erode
Damn, dude, I had mad 6502 assembly skillz in 1985, I could even write it out by hand - pencil on paper, and those slowly eroded through use of compilers for higher level languages until my last assembly experience in 1996, today… I’d be learning everyhing specific to assembly code from scratch. I guess I’m just useless now.
the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools.
Gotta agree there. We had two clear camps of programmers before LLM agents came along, and the camp I least enjoyed reviewing the code of before (and now) of is the camp that resisted adoption of new interesting tools the most loudly.
I think there is no equivalency between compilers and other tools, and LLMs. As the comment states, they are just the statistical prediction of what would come next. Compilers may sometimes give unexpected outcomes, but they are working to a defined set of rules and there is potential to see how they actually came to that outcome and address it.
Added to this is the prevalence of people thinking that LLMs can allow them to do anything, whether or not they understand it, it’s even sold like that. In my own organisation I have an operations manager thinking he can make pages for our Intranet - where does it store the data? How is access controlled? So many basic questions that an actual programmer would know to think of. Sure you can just keep asking people if they can fly a plane and maybe one will do well enough that they get you all the way there, till it comes to landing and it’s too late - maybe better to just ask a pilot to do it.
Our software engineers use it really well, they can read what it’s outputting to understand if it’s wrong, they know how to prompt it to avoid issues, they use it for snippets and fixes and that it won’t just write a whole program. However, it’s benefit to us (and the world) is nowhere near worth the monetary and environmental cost. The investors pouring in money are hoping they can be the company that people become reliant on, so they can survive the bubble and their ultimate goal of replacing real people.
Damn, dude, I had mad 6502 assembly skillz in 1985, I could even write it out by hand - pencil on paper, and those slowly eroded through use of compilers for higher level languages until my last assembly experience in 1996, today… I’d be learning everyhing specific to assembly code from scratch. I guess I’m just useless now.
Gotta agree there. We had two clear camps of programmers before LLM agents came along, and the camp I least enjoyed reviewing the code of before (and now) of is the camp that resisted adoption of new interesting tools the most loudly.
I think there is no equivalency between compilers and other tools, and LLMs. As the comment states, they are just the statistical prediction of what would come next. Compilers may sometimes give unexpected outcomes, but they are working to a defined set of rules and there is potential to see how they actually came to that outcome and address it.
Added to this is the prevalence of people thinking that LLMs can allow them to do anything, whether or not they understand it, it’s even sold like that. In my own organisation I have an operations manager thinking he can make pages for our Intranet - where does it store the data? How is access controlled? So many basic questions that an actual programmer would know to think of. Sure you can just keep asking people if they can fly a plane and maybe one will do well enough that they get you all the way there, till it comes to landing and it’s too late - maybe better to just ask a pilot to do it.
Our software engineers use it really well, they can read what it’s outputting to understand if it’s wrong, they know how to prompt it to avoid issues, they use it for snippets and fixes and that it won’t just write a whole program. However, it’s benefit to us (and the world) is nowhere near worth the monetary and environmental cost. The investors pouring in money are hoping they can be the company that people become reliant on, so they can survive the bubble and their ultimate goal of replacing real people.