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kibwentoday at 12:53 PM1 replyview on HN

LLMs are not even remotely comparable to compilers. This attempt at analogy is neither humorous nor insightful.


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jtrntoday at 1:22 PM

It depends on the level of analysis. Both change the abstraction level one works at. So if you can't decode the message, I can do it for you. People believed that something important was lost by moving up one abstraction layer, because knowing the lower-level details was important, more so than having the possibility of doing more because complexities have been abstracted away for you.

And almost every time in history this conflict has arisen, the stubborn people who want to stick to the "everybody should stay at the level of abstraction that I want to stay at!" have been proven wrong.

So if you don't see the comparison, you lack imagination. It's the same comparison Torvald Linus made, and even though all the rabid anti-AI people try to deny that it's a valid comparison by willfully misunderstanding the comparison, it's perfectly valid.

And I find both the article and the comment I responded to either ignorant of history, and worse than uninsightful, because they are just patently, historically, logically, and empirically wrong.

And I'm getting tired of the arrogant senior devs, that are not a fraction as useful as they think they are, whining and complaining at younger people who are creating imperfect but useful work with AI.

While the tools for AI coding are just exploding. How can you people say stuff like "They learn nothing" with a straight face is beyond me. I see people daily who use AI to solve problems and learn something in the process.

I am having such a blast over the last couple of years seeing how AI development just relentlessly disproves the claims from bitter old developers who don't want to be forced to do anything useful. And when the transition is complete, the gatekeepers will be gone, and we will be left with people trying to solve real problems.

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