alt Hacker NewsI'm not saying people can't have fun, I'm saying it's a misplaced sense of pride that gives me the ick when I sense it in others. I see plenty of people who readily disclose that their thing they "built" was just slopped together by an LLM and this is perfectly okay, because they aren't trying to take credit for accomplishments that they didn't put in the expected effort for.
The difference between the skill & effort required to build vs prompt your way to something is orders of magnitude different. If it took just as much effort, people would just do it by hand anyways.
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Yeah, there's something pathetic about being proud of something you didn't actually get challenged by making. Like, I love building Lego sets. It's relaxing, it's fun, and I enjoy having the completed model to put on a shelf and look at. But I would never in a million years say I was proud of those Lego models, or that I had a sense of accomplishment. That wouldn't be merited.
I think “build vs prompt” is a false binary that frames the argument badly.
There are way more nuanced uses of LLMs than skill-free “write me a facebook clone.” Like, hey LLM, help me develop tests of X, review this design for X, help me articulate what is wrong with the code for X, give me ideas for simplifying X, suggest optimizations for X, help me debug this failure trace for X, help me apply this refactor across all of X, and on and on. Even these are stupid examples that way over simplify.
I’m super proud of the work I’ve created /alongside/ LLMs. I’ll let it build me development aides and such with little oversight and there’s no skill there. But you can use it deliberately and maintain control, and it’s amazing to have a tool that can look through your code with you from so many angles.