Jeff Johnson2d ago

RE: https://mastodon.macstories.net/@macstories/116255585273477515

"Transitioning from the instrument player to the conductor of the orchestra"

I don't think this analogy is good, especially for an indie developer. A 40-piece orchestra needs a conductor, but a 4-piece rock band does not. In any case, the musicians are always the talent, a conductor merely a coordinator. Moreover, in classical music, the conductor is not even the composer.

Show threadJeff Johnson

From the article:
• I could not have done this without the AI
• The AI could not have done this without me

What you actually meant was that the AI could not have done this without a human. The question is whether you are now interchangeable with any other human.

Those who become dependent on LLMs are debilitating and obsoleting themselves. Don't fool yourself: any idiot can use an LLM.

Mar 19 at 12:38pmWeb
Show threadJeff Johnson2d ago

"akin to trying to convince the average Swift developer to use assembly language"

The average Swift developer should learn assembly language, for debugging purposes. This doesn't mean they need to WRITE assembly, but they need to UNDERSTAND it.

The more we use LLMs to write code, the less we know… about everything, except “prompting.”

Show threadMichael Moore2d ago
@lapcatsoftware I don't understand why people think these are the same. And I completely agree with your statement about understanding assembly language. You can argue it and I've actually heard it for many years now, that developers actually should try understanding much lower level languages. To some extent you can say that Java, C#, Swift, etc. have abstracted away too much, so developers don't really understand the implications of doing one thing over another.
Show threadMichael Moore2d ago
@lapcatsoftware And what happens when we've got rid of all the human input that is used to train the LLMs? Or what happens when these companies decide that running LLMs are no longer viable and shut them all down? People would have debilitated themselves for years and no longer have any clue how to function otherwise.