Mastodawn

Using a free software stack, you could be an effective developer with a relatively low budget. A cheap or used laptop and an internet subscription.

LLM coding is changing that too. You either need a very powerful and expensive machine to run a local model, or (currently more likely) an LLM subscription. We are lead to believe you have to pay a monthly fee to be an effective developer.

The prospect of your output as a developer being tied to a proprietary service seems risky at best.

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Peter N. M. Hansteen Mar 7

@jani I think that in the early 2030s we will be seeing dissertations and papers on "The Mid-2020s Developer Skills Erosion Caused by Indiscriminate Large Language Model (LLM) Use".

Believe me, it *will* be a hot academic topic.

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Jani Nikula Mar 7

@pitrh I'm inclined to think "The evolution of natural language for programming" will be a hotter topic still. It's another abstraction layer. Programming will, in some ways anyway, be accessible to more people than before.

At the same time, this is not incompatible with my original post, and LLM coding has tons of ethical and legal hurdles as well.

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The Penguin of Evil Mar 7

@jani @pitrh natural language programming. Bring back BASIC and Hypercard. They genuinely solved the I can't program well but I can make stuff problem, as in its own corner did dBase and it's friends

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Ben Evans

@etchedpixels @jani @pitrh Simon Wardley coined the term "conversational programing" many years ago, and I think that it's a far more useful apt and useful term than many of the others that are used in the space currently, and we should revive it!