alt Hacker NewsYou don’t “need” any LLMs to do software development. Plenty of us were productively writing code for years before these models were released, and many of us continue to do so. The “AI” companies want to sell you hype. But you don’t “need” them - not if you’re a legit, professional programmer.
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You could say this for any new technology though, it's a vacuous statement. No one needs a car, they can ride a horse. But step changes in technology do occur and raise the standard for everyone in a society, hence why we don't see horses for transportation anymore.
You don’t need it, but using it would make you more productive. As an example, I have worked in a code base which is pretty much opinionated. I have many Claude skills to build the boiler plate starting code and tests for the feature I have to build following the existing conventions and patterns in the code base and that saves a lot of manual coding time for me.
This is a very personalised use case, but I think everyone can find these kind of use cases that saves a lot of time for you.
I have been programming for 35 years and a professional programmer for 25 years. Of course I don't NEED AI to program, because I did it before.
This is completely unrelated to the how useful AI is for programming or how much more efficient you can be with it.
I never said you would need AI to do things you can do today. When I said it will not be 'all you ever need', my point is that NEW uses will come that will need more powerful AI. By definition, you can't NEED a new technology to do something that is already being done, because the fact that it is being done already proves you can do it without the new tech. However, that doesn't mean the tech can't do something new that does need the tech.
For example, no one needed an airplane before they were invented. However, you do need an airplane if you want to get somewhere 6000 miles away in less than a day.
There hasn't been a single bit of technology that is 'needed' if you use your strict definition of the word, because obviously humans existed and survived before the technology existed. Being absolutely necessary is not what makes a technology persist or spread, that is an artificial bar to reach.
Some people have such a natural aversion to LLMs that they will make incoherent arguments as to why they should go away. There are plenty of legitimate concerns and critiques of LLMs, you don't need to articulate arguments that you would never make about any other piece of technology to argue against their usage.
Thank you for your comment.
The narrative that LLMs are essential to the future of the trade often feels like an assault on my professional expertise.
Whatever your experience is, mine is that LLMs don't work well for software development. I wish people who use AI would be more willing take that perspective seriously.