alt Hacker NewsI just see it as tool.
Used to be you had to calculate things by hand on paper. Then we got calculators, then spreadsheets. Complaining that by hand was better seems line nonsense.
I'm old enough to have taken typing lessons in high school on typewriters with real ink and needed to use white-out to fix things and if there are too many mistakes having to start over from scratch. I don't want to go back.
Construction went from using a tap-and-die to make your own screws, now CnC machines, 3d printers, power drills, etc....
LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project.
I really don't get the hate.
Was I proud to write my own linked-list library and red-black tree system in the late 80s. Sure. And yet I was much happier when it was just a built in part of the language.
I'm really happy I can draw something in a drawing program and not have to sketch it on graph paper like I did in the 80s and manually convert the image to hex codes
Each step removed one more piece of friction.
I'm not trying to tell you what to like. If you like certain activities be my guest. I like to cook sometimes even though ordering out would be easier.
All I'm saying is I don't get the hate that something got easier. We have 1000s of examples fo things getting easier horses -> cars, wagon -> trucks, ships -> planes, oil paints -> photos, math -> spreadsheets, etc... So LLM made yet another thing easier. If you didn't complain about those other things getting easier, why are you complaining now?
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I find it interesting there's a post about inverse kinetics which is could be argued is "how to automate animation" or "how get rid of animators" or "how to make lots of animation less tedious" It's celebrated. Yet LLMs doing the similar things for coding is derided.
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I'm with you. I've done some pretty special things over the years I was employed, none of which had any input from LLMs. Now I'm retired and I have a tool at my fingertips that I can instruct, manage, and (sometimes eventually) get what I want. It's not massively dissimilar to managing a group of engineers...
The inspiration, the ideas, the workflow, the vision, the end product - all mine. The grunt work that takes all the time - hand it off to the LLM, and make sure it bloody works at the end.
With that approach, I built a compiler for my own language - it runs on {Mac, Linux, Windows} and any of those can produce code for {Mac, Linux, Windows, WASM, iOS, Android, Zynq, m68k, 6502} - the last 3 being more useful to me than most people I expect. I have a signed binary running on my phone, which was developed on a Linux box and never saw anything from an Apple Xcode installation...
That compiler was how I (and Claude) wrote a WASM client to a server back end, all of which use the exact same classes and data formats, making integration trivial.
I'm working on a cross-platform UI framework now, with a Cocoa-like UI description, that you drag lines between your code and the various UI platforms you want to support {Desktop, tablet, phone}, with mobile variants offering portrait and landscape. Write your actual program logic once, and visually connect UI into it, on a target-by-target basis. Support any platform with one codebase.
I wouldn't have considered taking on a program of this complexity without the LLM. It'd just have been a pipe-dream. They're tools. Wonderful tools, but still tools.
I think the IK comment is interesting.
Tedious animation is something that animators I worked with also hated doing, and they were always after tools to accelerate their workflow, so they could focus on the high-level decisions.
I've also used and built lots of refactoring tools. I've been fanatic about them for decades.
Using LLMs for that isn't that different, maybe it was a bit less deterministic before, but lately... holy shit, they've become good at it.
But the "animation is dead" discussion would still bother me if I was an animator.
This is a terrible example. Cars qualitatively opened up something that humans could never do before. Same with the computer. What about LLMs?
LLMs just replace what you were already doing, but don’t qualitatively open up all that much in the frontier. A million lines of LLM slop? Arguably LLMs close the frontier, rely too much on it and your ability to think hard and long ends up getting crushed.
> LLMs to me are just another tool. They help me get what I wanted (an app, a game, a web site). I'm still directing. It's still my idea, with the features/look I want. My design choices still make the end project.
> I really don't get the hate
I hate that you are reducing my craft to just the end results and nothing else. No value in my expertise or knowledge, all of the hours slogging through blog posts, IT forums, stackoverflow and technical pdfs and you have reduced that to "well what can you build for me?"
It's not just you, your attitude is very common, what else am I supposed to do except hate it? Just shrug my shoulders and smile, like "hey I just wasted 25 years of my life on pursuit of mastery of a skill that now has zero value to anyone?"
I wish I could press a button and erase everyone who thinks that way from existence. How dare you devalue my experience and passion so offhandedly and treat it like I'm the asshole for being upset by it.
If we strip away all the layers of onion, we are not left with a Platonic ideal onion, we're left with nothing. Removing every chore, task, craft, friction from life does not leave an ideal perfect life, it leaves nothing. Some people are feeling closer to that nothing than others.
A human who liked caring for horses, feeding them, brushing them, comforting them during thunderstorms, blanketing them in cold weather, riding them through the fields, tolerated mucking out the stables, is not just biding their time until someone invents the city bus so they can free up all of that timewasting labour and sit in a box turning a wheel left and right for the rest of their days, and then the self-driving taxi, so they can finally "be free". You can say that they can still care for horses today, but if mansions don't need stables and horses, if deliveries don't use horses, then it's no longer a tangled up job, life, part of a community, way of earning money, way to get some respect, feel useful, it's just standing in a field stroking an animal.