The Seven Voyages Of SteveOne of the things I loved about software development was that we were always trying to get better at it, and there was no ceiling in sight for that. Using LLMs to make code is the opposite of that - learning to use them is more akin to learning rituals than it is to intellectual development. And don’t give me that nonsense about it being like using a compiler to move up an abstraction level; it’s not, any more than becoming a manager is coding at another level of abstraction.
I lived through the era in the noughties when the only promotion available outside management was to become a “software architect”. This was supposedly another level of abstraction over development and these experienced developers would level up the whole process by being dedicated architects. And you know what happened if those architects didn’t still actively write code too? Their designs were absolute garbage.
The industry is convinced that the way forward is that everyone should be a manager / architect, and direct a gaggle of pattern matching machines that assemble a pastiche of previously written code. Because it’s faster to do that than to actually do the work yourself. I’m sure it is, but we’ve ceased to learn anything new, or even try anything new. It might seem new to you, but none of it is - not even accidentally. And even on a personal level you’ve learned nothing except summoning rituals
I’m channeling Miyazaki here in that I find this approach to be an insult to life itself, or at least to everything we used to value as an industry. It offends me on a visceral level such that I find it hard to understand people who don’t see it.
Iker@sinbad I think it's in part the natural endpoint for the "Everyone should learn to code" moment. Programming became the career shortcut to "success" and money, not a discipline and craft that people who were particularly interested in the problem space chose consciously. Inevitably, what you have is a lot of mediocre programmers who get excited at the thought of being able to close Jira tickets faster, even if the underlying quality is shit. And management is ecstatic that they get to point at how much more "work" is being done, even if they end up eating shit in the long term. Rarely has management been interested in training/retraining/teaching employees, so investigating the possibility of using tech that DOES remove a lot of the busy work from traditional tech stacks gets turned down. To say nothing about inefficiencies incurred due to bad management in general (but of course, if the disinterested mediocre programmer goes on to become the manager, what else should we expect?)
poetaster
ghosttie@sinbad I didn't think it's actually faster if you're checking every line and getting it to fix every mistake it makes, so you only get the speed benefits if you lower the quality and maintainability
@ghosttie oh they’re definitely lowering quality and maintainability, that’s been immediately jettisoned