This article is lumps design and implementation together. In my experience, LLMs are really quite bad at designing anything interesting. They are sort of tolerable at implementation — they’re remarkably persistent (compared to humans, anyway), they will tirelessly use whatever framework, good or bad, you throw at them, and they will produce code that is quite painful to look at. And they’ll say that they’re architecting things and hope you’re impressed.

When I was an intern for some reason they issued me a voip phone for my desk. One day I got bored and figured out I could telnet into it. Nothing interesting but it was still a fun moment for me!

I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency".

Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and go back to its original approach, or mix the two, or whatever. Eventually it was easier just to quit fighting it and let it do things the way it wanted.

What I've seen is that after the initial dopamine rush of being able to do things that would have taken much longer manually, a few iterations of this kind of interaction has slowly led to a disillusionment of the whole project, as AI keeps pushing it in a direction I didn't want.

I think this is especially true if you're trying to experiment with new approaches to things. LLMs are, by definition, biased by what was in their training data. You can shock them out of it momentarily, whish is awesome for a few rounds, but over time the gravitational pull of what's already in their latent space becomes inescapable. (I picture it as working like a giant Sierpinski triangle).

I want to say the end result is very akin to doom scrolling. Doom tabbing? It's like, yeah I could be more creative with just a tad more effort, but the AI is already running and the bar to seeing what the AI will do next is so low, so....