Readit NewsJust because LLM learned the entire internet does not mean it can’t 10x a developer.
Were all standing on shoulders of giants - LLM or no LLM. LLM gives you extra pair of ladders. That are wobbly for sure. But ladders still.
Using LLM invalidates nothing and the 10x stories are totally plausible.
The plagiarization argument is to me moot - most of us are plagiarizing previous work, weather we know it or not.
If LLMs maintain the code, the API boundary definitions/documentation and orchestration, it might be manageable.
Some have compared it to working with a very junior programmer. I haven't done that in a long while, but when I did, it didn't really feel like I was "offloading" much, and I could still trust even the most junior programmer to tell me whether the job was done well or not (and of any difficulties they encountered or insight they've learnt) much more than I can an agent, at least today.
Trust is something we have, for the most part, when we work with either other people or with tools. Working without (or with little) trust is something quite novel. Personally, I don't mind that an agent can't accomplish many tasks; I mind a great deal that I can't trust it to tell me whether it was able to do what I asked or not.
Sure it is.
Modern ecosystem is sadly full of API:s like WPF on Windows that are both verbose and configuration heavy. Now, some people may be able to internalize xaml with little effort but not all us - and then you basically move forward iteratively, looking for code example, trying this or that … basically random walking towards something usable.
Or you use an agentic LLM and it does this peeking and poking for you, and with decades old APIs like WPF likely has enough context to do the thing you asked it to do far more competently than you could train yourself to program WPF in a few days.
Of course in the context of this example WPF was your main duty, you _would_ learn the ins and outs of it.
In quite many jobs a task like this may not infact be even among your top ten duties but you need to do it.
In these sort of situations a LLM is really nice. The worst it provides is a good first guess how to do something.
If your contex is something like radiology treatment then no, don’t use LLM!
But there are thoushands of miserable non-critical but necessary components in production for which LLM is just fine.
Agents are a boon for extraverts and neurotypical people. If it gets to the point where the industry switches to agents, I’ll probably just find a new career
I do agree it’s definetly a tool category with a unique set of features and am not surprised it’s offputting to some. But it’s appeal is definetly clear to me as an introvert.
For me LLM:s are just a computer interface you can program using natural language.
I think I’m slightly ADD. I love coding _interesting_ things but boring tasks cause extreme discomfort.
Now - I can offload the most boring task to LLM and spend my mental energy on the interesting stuff!
It’s a great time to be a software engineer!
I'm using it mostly for C#, WPF and OpenTK. The type system seems to help a lot.
The UI logic it recommends is mostly god awful. But at least for me when it's given a pattern it can apply, it does so pretty well.
However, at leas for me there is lots of "small enough context" boilerplate that the context can deal with.
Clearly this is not a tool in the sense it's predictable.
I think it's just about bureaucratic faux-economical thinking infringing to doctors workspace cutting overall effectiveness.
The doctor was listening to my breathing, looking at the throat, asking me and my mother questions, and saying various medical phrases to her assistant, who was then writing them into my patient records (a thick paper notebook).
I’m not sure what the argument here is. That you should only use the most primitive tools available?
”LLMs suck” arguments sound exactly like ”IDE:s suck! True engineers writes everything in notepad.exe”. Or ”debuggers suck! Use only printfs!”
People have different ways of cognition and different strategies of problem solving and tool use. The fact you can’t understand other persons tool use is not an argument against those tools. It simply points out the tools may not be usefull to the critics mode of cognition or problem solving. Not that the tools suck.