alt Hacker News> And then, inevitably, comes the character evaluation, which goes something like this:
I saw a version of this yesterday where a commenter framed LLM-skepticism as a disappointing lack of "hacker" drive and ethos that should be applied to making "AI" toolchains work.
As you might guess, I disagreed: The "hacker" is not driven just by novelty in problems to solve, but in wanting to understand them on more than a surface layer. Messing with kludgy things until they somehow work is always a part of software engineering... but the motive and payoff comes from knowing how things work, and perceiving how they could work better.
What I "fear" from LLMs-in-coding is that they will provide an unlimited flow of "mess around until it works" drudgery tasks with none of the upside. The human role will be hammering at problems which don't really have a "root cause" (except in a stochastic sense) and for which there is never any permanent or clever fix.
Would we say someone is "not really an artist" just because they don't want to spend their days reviewing generated photos for extra-fingers, circling them, and hitting the "redo" button?
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> What I "fear" from LLMs-in-coding is that they will provide an unlimited flow of "mess around until it works" drudgery tasks with none of the upside.
I feel like its very true to the hacker spirit to spend more time customizing your text editor than actually programming, so i guess this is just the natural extension.
I share your fear.
We have a hard enough time finding juniors (hell, non-juniors) that know how to program and design effectively.
The industry jerking itself off over Leetcode practice already stunted the growth of many by having them focus on rote memorization and gaming interviews.
With ubiquitous AI and all of these “very smart people” pushing LLMs as an alternative to coding, I fear we’re heading into an era where people don’t understand how anything works and have never been pushed to find out.
Then again, the ability of LLMs to write boilerplate may be the reset that we need to cut out all of the people that never really had an interest in CS that have flocked to the industry over the last decade or so looking for an easy big paycheck.