alt Hacker NewsThese days nobody bangs their heads over typos.
LLMs evaporated 90% of the "moments of despair" when you have an error and googling it isn't helping, or googling it made you realize you have to read 30min of documentation.
Coding is a joy now. LLMs shaved off all the rough edges.
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You can't possibly believe this, or you and me (and many others) are doing something different. LLMs have created an entire new - huge - set of bang-your-head moments, as they go off half-cocked in a million simultaneous directions, chasing their tail, or just making shit up. And since the vast majority of work is on existing - often ancient - codebases, let's find out if you feel the same way in 18 months.
LLMs moved the moments of despair to PR reviews for me. It used to be that you could check on a junior dev occassionally throughout the day to make sure they're on the right track. Now you step away for 2 hours and they're raising a PR of bad code smell spaghetti and moving on to repeat their AI slopfest on the next task.
It's getting hard to keep up with trying to teach new devs what bad code looks like. And I swear sometimes they just copy my PR comments into their AI tool to fix the mistakes without any of the learning.
Languages have been reporting compile and runtime errors for decades. Additionally very few senior developers don't already have their minds wired to spot typos the way copy editors spot bad punctuation. Typos were only really a problem for students.
> LLMs evaporated 90% of the "moments of despair"
And then condensed an equal quantity of despair out of the ether via confident confabulations.
They created other kinds of despair.
A year ago I would've told my boss “can't be done” about my work today. I'd tell him to get me the right person to talk to (our partner, not an alien) who could give me some insight into what the hell I'm supposed to be doing to consume their API. Or to at least explain why it is that this can't be done.
Nowadays, I spent a couple of weeks reverse engineering their terrible ideas. Yeah, it worked. But it's a complete waste of my time, and tokens, energy, chips and RAM. And worst of all, it will lead to a terrible design.
That will work, but will eventually colapse under its own weight, as we use our increased power to increase our sloppiness and take it a little further. Because we can manage it. For now.