alt Hacker NewsEveryone addresses this differently, but for me, I always grated at people whose knowledge of esoteric patterns and language features was their whole identity.
It feels to me like suffering through programming built that knowledge, and so that knowledge was an indicator of taste and experience and persistence, but then it became cosplayed as people sought the knowledge itself in "patterns", or "features" rather than the experience of just building things.
The LLM thing just cuts the same way. It's probably not using your favorite pattern or language feature, or maybe it automatically is, but either way your annoyance is about it stems from the quality signals being discounted: You can't really assert experience through that kind of knowledge anymore if people are providing value while stepping around your hard-won lessons and using your favorite pattern or feature through LLMs. You saw this in the linkedin posts early on: All the programming influencers asserted their value by saying they wrote better quality code than the code the LLM wrote.
This is worst for junior devs. Making a clean, well factored codebase as a portfolio project was a near-instant win on the job market because it meant this person either suffered like you did, or they listened to seniors and walked the walk. That signal is absolutely gone now.
I think that dilution of signal explains almost all of the jr hiring freeze, actually: https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-signalling.html
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> people whose knowledge of esoteric patterns and language features was their whole identity
The worst were the ones acting as gatekeepers during hiring process. You could have built S3 and they'd still look down on you because you didn't knew about some weird feature in Java.
For sure, there have always been obnoxious people trying to gatekeep who they feel met their arbitrary bar of "good developer" with trivia or a command of arcane details. It makes the work harder and it discourages talented people who are new to the field, like junior devs.
Maybe LLM tooling can help people demystify some of that. I think that would be a good thing.
In my experience, LLM tools are not infallible and I've seen them introduce changes in one place that causes defects in two or three other places. They write code that I find difficult to read and that can make diagnosing these bugs harder than it needs to be. People have brought me code that LLM tools have written because they are surprised that it doesn't work and are wondering if somehow they, the human, just doesn't understand something.
Maybe this is just another bump and these tools will continue to improve. Until these things aren't a problem. As it stands today, I think there's still a place for a people in commercial software development.
What a great comment, I wanted to quote my favorite parts but would just have to quote the whole thing. The “I suffered so you must too otherwise you’re unworthy” is so on point. The people whose identity is tied to gatekeeping programming are the worst and now those gates are crumbling and they can’t stand it.