logoalt Hacker News

xantronixyesterday at 5:10 PM1 replyview on HN

Are you budgeting time to allow people to properly evaluate LLMs and possibly struggle with them? This is not the sort of new tool whose utility is universally immediately obvious to all builders and craftsmen out there. Are you willing to pay down the likely debt of some individual contributors never clicking with this, or being outright resentful to towards the technology or the mandates? There is a LOT of self-selecting bias from LLM proponents assuming everybody else is willing or able to travel the same path as them.


Replies

mh-yesterday at 8:43 PM

> Are you budgeting time to allow people to properly evaluate LLMs and possibly struggle with them?

Great question. That is absolutely the goal. My take is that building with LLMs - at least with the current popular harnesses like Claude Code - is a skill on its own, and people need time to develop that skill and also to figure out where these tools might fit into their workflows.

> Are you willing to pay down the likely debt of some individual contributors never clicking with this or being outright resentful to towards the technology or the mandates?

I'll be honest as I have been elsewhere in the thread: A few years from now, I don't know what the state of the technology or its adoption will be, or what expectations of software engineers at large will be.

But for the foreseeable future, yes, absolutely, I'm willing to give engineers the time and space to develop familiarity and comfort with the tools, as long as they're engaging in good faith.

edit: oops, didn't mean to dodge the last part of your question (re: resentment): I genuinely don't know the answer to how I'll handle that, but I'm also sure it'll happen. Hopefully I'll still be in a position to speak publicly about how one can deal with those challenges.

edit 2: also, thank you for the thoughtful questions and dialogue.