alt Hacker NewsAfter 30 years in front of the desktop, we are processing dopamine differently.
When I speak about 10 years from now, I’m referring to who will become an average developer if we replace the real coding experience learning curve with LLMs from day one.
I also hear a lot of tool analogies — tractors for developers, etc. But every tool, without an exception, provides replicable results. In the case of LLMs, however, repeatable results are highly questionable, so it seems premature to me to treat LLMs in the same way as any other tool.
Right, I've seen a lot of facile comparisons to calculators.
It may be true that a cohort of teachers were wrong (on more than one level) when they chastised students with "you need to learn this because you won't always have a calculator"... However calculators have some essential qualities which LLM's don't, and if calculators lacked those qualities we wouldn't be using them the way we do.
In particular, being able to trust (and verify) that it'll do a well-defined, predictable, and repeatable task that can be wrapped into a strong abstraction.