alt Hacker NewsWe're at a point in the LLM curve where there's two huge, polarized groups of developers:
- the ones who don't see any value on AI for coding and dismiss it as a fad at every change they get
- the ones who are in love with the new tools and adopting as many as they can on their workflows
I know the arguments of the second bunch well. But very curious about what the "AI is a fad" bunch thinks will happen. Are we going to suddenly realize all these productivity gains people are claiming are all lies and go back to coding by typing characters on emacs and memorizing CS books? Will StackOverflow suddenly return as the most popular source of copy-paste code slop?
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> Are we going to suddenly realize all these productivity gains people are claiming are all lies and go back to coding by typing characters on emacs and memorizing CS books?
If you have not learned CS, how do you expect to separate the LLM wheat from the chaff?
> Will StackOverflow suddenly return as the most popular source of copy-paste code slop?
Coding sites manually populated by humans are dead.
> Are we going to suddenly realize all these productivity gains people are claiming are all lies
I'll grant you that many have become adamant that LLMs suddenly, out of the blue, became useful just last week, which is much too soon to have any concrete data for, but coding agents in some shape have been around for quite a while and in the data we have there isn't offering of any suggestion of productivity gains yet.
And I'm not sure many are even claiming that they are more productive, just that the LLMs have allowed them to carry out a task faster. Here's the thing: At least my experience, coding was never the bottleneck. The bottleneck has always been the business people squabbling over what the customers and business need. They haven't yet figured out how to get past their egos.
The most promise for productivity seems to be from lone startup founders who aren't constrained by the squabbling found in a larger organization and can now get more done thanks to the task shortening. However, the economic conditions are not favourable to that environment right now. Consumers are feeling tapped out, marketing has become way harder, and, even when everything else is in place, nobody is going to consider your "SaaS" when they believe the foundational LLMs will be able to do the same thing tomorrow.
At first I was grumpy that the artisanal part of programming would go away. Now Im just happy to be giving my hands a break from RSI.