洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) Mar 21

LLM coding assistants didn't create a split between craft-lovers and make-it-go developers. They revealed one that was always there.

For craft-lovers, what's being bypassed isn't the output but the act itself. Marx called this separation from the act of production. But the alienation isn't coming from the LLM. It's coming from a market that penalizes whoever produces output more slowly.

Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

Les Orchard made a quiet observation recently that I haven't been able to shake. Before LLM coding assistants arrived, the split between developers was…

Hong Minhee on Things
Show threadKen Milmore
@hongminhee There is also the extent to which one is salting one's own earth by producing poor quality code. Working as a long-term staff developer on any project where quality is regularly sacrificed to meet release deadlines leads to a growing realisation that your job will eventually become untenable. Eventually the bugs and technical debt pile up the workload to the point where you have to get out for your own sanity. I've worked on a couple of projects like this even before LLMs existed.
Mar 21 at 9:51amWeb
Show threadKen MilmoreMar 21
@hongminhee As a few people have repeated lately, "functionality is an asset, but code is a liability". There is a tendency for management to overvalue code, as the only tangible product of what they have spent on development. This tends to create a reluctance to refactor or rework code to fix major design flaws, and leads to the eventual death of a lot of small commercial software products.