alt Hacker News> In contrast, LLMs in their current state have (for me) dramatically reduced the distance between an idea and a working implementation, which has been legitimately transformative in my software dev life.
Feels like a false dichotomy.
Have I become faster with LLMs? Yes, maybe. Is it 10x or 1000x or 10,000x? Definitely not. I think actually in the past I would have leaned more on senior developers, books, stack overflow etc. but now I can be much more independent and proactive.
LLM-based tools are a wide spectrum, and to argue that the whole spectrum is worth exploring because one sliver of it has definite utility is a bit wonky. Kind of like saying $SHITCOIN is worth investing in because $BITCOIN mooned as a speculative asset:
- I’m bullish on LLMs chat interfaces replacing StackOverflow and O’Reilly
- I could not be more bearish on Agents automating software engineering
Replies
> Have I become faster with LLMs? Yes, maybe.
The question isn’t if you’ve improved. It’s if the path you took to getting to your current improvement could have been shortcut with the benefit of hindsight. Given the number of dead ends we’ve traversed, the answer almost certainly is yes.
>Feel like we’re back at Adobe Dreameaver release and everyone is claiming that web development jobs are dead
I truly believe so much of the anti-AI sentiment is the same as the Luddites.
They're often used as a meme now, but they were very real people, faced with a real and present risk to their livelihoods. They acted out of fear, but not just irrational fear.
AI is the same: it's unquestionably (to anyone evaluating it fairly) a huge boost to productivity ... and also, unquestionably, a threat to programmer jobs.
Maybe the OP is right about waiting, but to me whenever new tech is disrupting jobs, that seems like the best time to learn it. If you don't, it's not just FOMO as the author suggests ... it's failing to keep up on the skills that keep you employed.