* in a thoughtful way (which most devs are terrible at)
* in the short/medium term (because they atrophy reasoning skills and cut off upskilling opportunities for more junior staff)
* while still having to maintain your skills to catch out the many inevitable issues
* while trying to maintain the morale doing the least enjoyable thing about programming every day - reading someone else’s code
* while managers press you to review more code, more quickly beyond what is possible to actually review
* with dubiously evaluated productivity gains, ignoring tech debt and dangerous lack of whole codebase knowledge
* with uncertain future financial burden as key business pipelines are hurriedly sloppified with no real purpose or plan
* living with the moral burden of funneling money directly into the pockets of deranged American technofeudalists and a Taiwanese fuckboy in a bad leather jacket
More or less, though I would argue that some of these aren’t actually a problem with the LLMs themselves. Specifically, the issues with management and “enslopification”. I would also push you to think more on which parts of this are purely your own dislikes - I, for example, actually enjoy reviewing other people’s code.
That said, I don’t disagree that LLMs are largely being used in ways that are not useful or helpful. However, I believe that time will show those uses as the harm they are. Businesses that went too hard on it will have to spend huge amounts of money to backtrack and some will not survive the endeavor. Aside from the scale, this isn’t too different from the crypto and blockchain nonsense that popped up everywhere when those were the hot new tech. A lot of companies will fail and a lot of time and money will be wasted in the process.
I’m trying to have a nuanced opinion about this. I do think that LLMs are pretty bad, but I don’t find myself landing on thinking they’re entirely bad. Time will tell and I’d actually be pretty happy to be proven wrong.
* in a thoughtful way (which most devs are terrible at)
* in the short/medium term (because they atrophy reasoning skills and cut off upskilling opportunities for more junior staff)
* while still having to maintain your skills to catch out the many inevitable issues
* while trying to maintain the morale doing the least enjoyable thing about programming every day - reading someone else’s code
* while managers press you to review more code, more quickly beyond what is possible to actually review
* with dubiously evaluated productivity gains, ignoring tech debt and dangerous lack of whole codebase knowledge
* with uncertain future financial burden as key business pipelines are hurriedly sloppified with no real purpose or plan
* living with the moral burden of funneling money directly into the pockets of deranged American technofeudalists and a Taiwanese fuckboy in a bad leather jacket
Does that cover all the caveats?
More or less, though I would argue that some of these aren’t actually a problem with the LLMs themselves. Specifically, the issues with management and “enslopification”. I would also push you to think more on which parts of this are purely your own dislikes - I, for example, actually enjoy reviewing other people’s code.
That said, I don’t disagree that LLMs are largely being used in ways that are not useful or helpful. However, I believe that time will show those uses as the harm they are. Businesses that went too hard on it will have to spend huge amounts of money to backtrack and some will not survive the endeavor. Aside from the scale, this isn’t too different from the crypto and blockchain nonsense that popped up everywhere when those were the hot new tech. A lot of companies will fail and a lot of time and money will be wasted in the process.
I’m trying to have a nuanced opinion about this. I do think that LLMs are pretty bad, but I don’t find myself landing on thinking they’re entirely bad. Time will tell and I’d actually be pretty happy to be proven wrong.