The Seven Voyages Of SteveThe breathless folks who have watched one person make a basic prototype of a piece of software authored with an LLM and then extrapolating that this is the future are just illustrating how much they don’t understand the problem. Bashing out modified template code (copy/paste/modify) isn’t *remotely* the hard part of making software. The hard part is understanding the problem and figuring out why a solution doesn’t work quite right. LLMs can’t do the former, and make the latter *much* worse
I guarantee this won’t stop these people using it anyway and creating all sorts of half-assed things that *sort of*work but have all sorts of edge case problems that no-one understands. These things will costs 10x as much to fix later as to do right in the first place, and *maybe* this will be kind of the same as their experience of hiring certain big name contract software companies (I’ve had to mop up after these companies before, but at least their terrible code might have comments).
It doesn’t make a lot of difference to me, I’m crossing the threshold into perceived obsolescence anyway (ageism is definitely a thing in this industry), but it saddens me that this will be yet another weapon in the arsenal of people who don’t really understand the difference between good and bad software to drag the average down even further. I’d like to think it will be used primarily as an advisory/auditing tool than a generative one, but I’ve been around too long to believe that
LR@sinbad do not go gently into that good night!
Daniel Ludwig
elFlashor@sinbad We have to brace ourselves for a new generation of publicly used software (in stores, public transport, banks, etc...) that have been cheaply made with LLMs.
They will work even worse than the current ones, with no money to fix them or even try to, and face even more excuses of the sort "sorry I cannot fix your (albeit very simple!) issue here, the software doesn't let me".
All that was already happening, but it's just gonna get worse and worse...
Sef 🌈@sinbad I wonder if other industries have been through something similar. For example, would the first generation of woodworkers be upset about the quality of todays mass produced flat pack furniture?
I notice a lack of good coding practices in ~90% of YT devlogs. Should I be concerned about that, or should I be happy that coding games is more accessible now? 🤷♂️
@Sef yeah the success of IKEA certainly doesn’t bode well for any skilled endeavour. 😕
Bad code from juniors is fine, we all have to learn. Experiencing the effects of bad code is usually the best teacher. The problem will be when you can’t really learn anymore because whatever gets spat out of an algorithm has no context. And right now it’s learning from humans who have some level of understanding - what happens when LLMs start learning from each other? Zero understanding, all pattern matching
@sinbad Exactly. My example about the next generation learning from YT is that they’ll then go on to teach the generation after, but they won’t have picked up several key lessons. If LLMs are doing the teaching, that’s an even lower bar. It feels like a race to the bottom as a trade off for accessibility. While accessibility is good, the loss of craftsmanship is disheartening.
@Sef the key to having both accessibility and a path to expertise is having a continuum of thoughtful people up the scale sharing their insights and expertise, with the most important part being the “why”, with the “how” being important but secondary. We lose the “why” completely with LLMs because even they don’t know
@sinbad Couldn’t have described it better.
I’ve struggled sometimes to demonstrate the “why” to mentees. If an LLM mentor doesn’t even know, it’s a lost cause.
silentw@sinbad It really saddens me that people are so ageist in the gaming industry, I'd like nothing more than to work with people that have 20+ years of experience... but the most visible of those people have become serial studio heads who gut a staff to make a terrible AAA game and then move on, leaving corpses in their wake.
I think it's less pure ageism and more that people of that age are most often seen in abusive management roles by younger people in the industry, engendering systemic mistrust.
I think it's less pure ageism and more that people of that age are most often seen in abusive management roles by younger people in the industry, engendering systemic mistrust.
@silentw I can understand that, but then again judging a group based on a few outliers is basically the definition of an “ism” 😉 Of course the vast majority of people don’t become those abusive studio heads
@silentw but really the ageism I was referring to was more mid level hiring managers, many of whom won’t even look at a resume for a programmer over 50. Part of that is assuming young people are smarter, but a lot of it is, sadly, knowing that young people are easier to exploit. So in many ways it’s just as bad for everyone regardless of age
Colin the MathmoCalling @Chartodon Spine ...
CC: @sinbad