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feverzsjtoday at 7:42 AM4 repliesview on HN

Pretty much sums up the LLM fanbase.


Replies

discreteeventtoday at 8:56 AM

I don't think it's the complete fanbase. However, there are lots of people in the world who live their whole life by vibing. It's a viable way to live and sometimes it's the only way to live. But they have a very loose relationship with truth and reason. Programming was a domain that filtered out those people because they found it hard to succeed at it. LLM's have changed that and it's a huge problem. It's hard to know if LLMs will end up being a net win for the industry. They may speed up the good programmers a little, but those people were able to program anyway without LLMs. They will speed up the bad programmers a lot and that's where the balance sheet goes into the red.

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wallst07today at 10:38 AM

Fanbase, maybe. Software engineers using these projects? Probably forking and updating themselves.

FWIW, I've opened a half dozen PRs from LLMs and had them approved. I have some prompts I use to make them very difficult to tell they are AI.

However if it is a big anti-llm project I just fork and have agents rebase my changes.

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ZaoLahmatoday at 10:28 AM

I'm firmly in the LLM fanbase. Not because I can't type code (was doing it for over 17 years, everywhere from low level hardware drivers in C to web frontend to robot development at home as a hobby - coding is fun!), but because in my profession it allows me to focus more on the abstraction layer where "it matters".

I'm not saying that I'm no longer dealing with code at all though. The way I work is interactively with the LLM and pretty much tell it exactly what to do and how to do it. Sometimes all the way down to "don't copy the reference like that, grab a deep copy of the object instead". Just like with any other type of programming, the only way to achieve valuable and correct results is by knowing exactly what you want and express that exactly and without ambiguity.

But I no longer need to remember most of the syntax for the language I happen to work with at the moment, and can instead spend time thinking about the high level architecture. To make sure each involved component does one thing and one thing well, with its complexities hidden behind clear interfaces.

Engineers who refuse to, or can't, or won't utilize the benefits that LLMs bring will be left behind. It's just the way it is. I'm already seeing it happening.

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andy_ppptoday at 10:21 AM

Not really - I imagine as with almost everything in life there's a normal distribution, in this case of the quality with which people use AI tools.

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