alt Hacker NewsI had the pleasure to talk to Loris about this topic just last week and I've liked his take very much.
His point is not coming from a place of LLM demonization. He very much acknowledges their usefulness, especially in a business context, e.g. for implementing yet another standard CRUD application and for shipping all the other "average" (in quality) business features quickly.
His point is a different one entirely: Say Andrew Kelley is attending the Zig Day. Why would you ask an LLM about a Zig programming problem you're struggling with instead of learning from the man himself? There's simply no LLM as knowledgeable about Zig as Andrew and the other people working on it or with it on the daily.
In other words: Zig Days are an opportunity for people to learn from each other and to spend time together (= the "Community" in "VP of Community"), and LLM are diminishing this opportunity.
Besides, Zig itself is mainly a language for people who care not just that a problem is solved but also about how it's being solved. ("Create software you can love.") While LLMs don't prevent anyone from doing so, they make it much more appealing to just vibe-code everything and not look too closely at the implementation.
Being negative against the utility of AI is sometimes besides the point or a strawman (don’t know about this instance). Only an idiot would argue that cars don’t have utility in cities and countrysides that are already paved over. Or that they are slower. Or that the train can get you from Bob’s to Burger Establishment with less walking. But they may want other things like more walkable cities and less mass extinction in a hundred years time.
No one needs to proclaim the utility of The Car before criticizing car culture.
This piece already says that all the clanker maximalism may be correct. shrugs Then it says that this get-together is for people who like programming. Even if the whirlwind of progress comes and takes their profession. Because then it could still be a hobby.
And this is too negative-against-AI for some people in this thread? Programming as a hobby? Okay, fine. Maybe we will have sold off all our RAM in a years time and the Government will have outlawed unassisted programming as too dangerous. The piece is too optimistic.