alt Hacker News> It's like the articles point: we don't do assembly anymore and no one considers gcc to be controversial and no one today says "if you think gcc is fun I will never understand you, real programming is assembly, that's the fun part"
The compiler reliably and deterministically produces code that does exactly what you specified in the source code. In most cases, the code it produces is also as fast/faster than hand written assembly. The same can't be said for LLMs, for the simple reason that English (and other natural languages) is not a programming language. You can't compile English (and shouldn't want to, as Dijkstra correctly pointed out) because it's ambiguous. All you can do is "commission" another
> Do you resent folks like us that do find it fun?
For enjoying it on your own time? No. But for hyping up the technology well beyond it's actual merits, antagonizing people who point out it's shortcomings, and subjecting the rest of us to worse code? Yeah, I hold that against the LLM fans.
That a coding agent or LLM is a different technology than a compiler and that the delta in industry standard workflow looks different isn’t quite my point though: things change. Norms change. That’s the real crux of my argument.
> But for hyping up the technology well beyond it's actual merits, antagonizing people who point out it's shortcomings, and subjecting the rest of us to worse code? Yeah, I hold that against the LLM fans.
Is that what I’m doing? I understand your frustration. But I hope you understand that this is a straw man: I can straw man the antagonists and AI-hostile folks but the point is the factions and tribes are complex and unreasonable opinions abound. My stance is that people can dismiss coding agents at their peril, but it’s not really a problem: taking the gcc analogy, in the early compiler days there was a period where compilers were weak enough that assembly by hand was reasonable. Now it would be just highly inefficient and underperformant to do that. But all the folks that lamented compilers didn’t crumble away, they eventually adapted. I see that analogy as being applicable here, it may be hard to see the insanity of coding agents because we’re not time travelers from 2020 or even 2022 or 3. But this used to be an absurd idea and is now very serious and highly adopted. But still quite weak!! Still we’re missing key reliability and functionality and capabilities. But if we got this far this fast, and if you realize that coding agent training is not limited in the same way that e.g. vanilla LLM training is by being a verifiable domain, we seem to be careening forward. But by nature of their current weakness, absolutely it is reasonable not to use them and absolutely it is reasonable to point out all of their flaws.
Lots of unreasonable people out there, my argument is simply: be reasonable.