It's demotivating to think that:
-
@cwebber @spritely This is similar to the problem I have making video games: Some portion of my audience will pirate my work. Technically that doesn't harm me, *but* if *everyone* pirates the game then I don't get any money and I don't get to keep making games. I decide I don't care because not everyone pirates games and *some* of the people playing the game will pay for it. LLMs, for code, sets up the possibility the entire audience will be pirating the work. Which is wild since my code is MIT
@cwebber @spritely This said, I want to give you the flipside to the process you're describing: I am currently creating a small programming language which exists for no purpose except for me to make games for the Game Boy and NES. When I look at my language, I think: *An LLM user could not use this language, because there is not a sufficient corpus to generate code from¹*. And this sparks joy in me
¹ And a significant portion of the corpus is testcases designed to fail
-
In a sense, the decision is somewhat made for us in that we're developing next-generation stuff that LLMs don't know how to auto-code at @spritely. We are working on core infrastructure that needs to be carefully thought about and written. LLMs introduce a lot of errors and aren't good at doing this kind of work on their own.
And the goal was always that our work is there to be lifted from, to spread outward, the way people have long drawn from the well of the MIT / Stanford research labs in CS for decades, but for decentralized networking today
But doing it now, in this way, in this environment, it's just really depressing and demotivating.
@cwebber @spritely once the honeymoon period is over and the folks who keep getting rm'ed get louder and more often complain than the success stories gush, the scale will tip.
people have realised cloud was way riskier and more expensive and have started brining stuff in house again, the same will happen with llms.
itll just take a critical mass, like anything else.
and the llm horror stories are piling up
-
It's demotivating to think that:
- LLMs aren't good at producing original / novel work
- You still need experts to advance that stuff
- It will always be slower to move without using LLMs
- Once an innovation is done though, an innovation can always be scooped up by the LLM users
- "Bro why are you doing all this manually, I just vibe coded that in a weekend"Will it always be this way? It's depressing in the meanwhile, at least.
-
@cwebber @spritely This said, I want to give you the flipside to the process you're describing: I am currently creating a small programming language which exists for no purpose except for me to make games for the Game Boy and NES. When I look at my language, I think: *An LLM user could not use this language, because there is not a sufficient corpus to generate code from¹*. And this sparks joy in me
¹ And a significant portion of the corpus is testcases designed to fail
-
@jorgecandeias @cwebber @spritely I think it's incredibly alarmist to suggest that people won't take an interest in learning programming even the old "untainted" way. We already had this kind of fear mongering even before LLM's but with high level programming languages and is untrue.
-
It's demotivating to think that:
- LLMs aren't good at producing original / novel work
- You still need experts to advance that stuff
- It will always be slower to move without using LLMs
- Once an innovation is done though, an innovation can always be scooped up by the LLM users
- "Bro why are you doing all this manually, I just vibe coded that in a weekend"Will it always be this way? It's depressing in the meanwhile, at least.
@cwebber slop machines might let you move 2 times faster but it’s at the cost of 5x the technical debt and rapid cognitive decline. any code that comes out of an LLM is a toy/liability at best
-
-
It's demotivating to think that:
- LLMs aren't good at producing original / novel work
- You still need experts to advance that stuff
- It will always be slower to move without using LLMs
- Once an innovation is done though, an innovation can always be scooped up by the LLM users
- "Bro why are you doing all this manually, I just vibe coded that in a weekend"Will it always be this way? It's depressing in the meanwhile, at least.
@cwebber idk, i'm ignoring it as best i can and it is making me quite happy
-
-
@cwebber Agreed. It’s making free and open source software development feel less rewarding. Less meaningful.
-
It's demotivating to think that:
- LLMs aren't good at producing original / novel work
- You still need experts to advance that stuff
- It will always be slower to move without using LLMs
- Once an innovation is done though, an innovation can always be scooped up by the LLM users
- "Bro why are you doing all this manually, I just vibe coded that in a weekend"Will it always be this way? It's depressing in the meanwhile, at least.
-
@cwebber For what it’s worth I think that we are eventually going to recognize “needing to throw massive computation at things” as a symptom of language and discoverability shortcomings that we’ll find better ways to address. We already package utility up in libraries and deterministic generators, but finding and learning what resources do what remains difficult.
I think there’s still a better future out there where solving new problems is still a non-captured contribution to the common good.
@cwebber I mean: we can imagine a world where the boilerplate falls away. We can imagine a world where we can describe problem to a computer that lets it say "these are the parts of this problem that seem new, but the rest looks like this thing you already have, that you can use". We can imagine communal systems where solving that new problem becomes a contribution to a common understanding rather than just value to be captured and re-sold as a subscription.
-
-
@cwebber im still resisting the belief that 'moving fast' is at all good or useful. sprinting is shitting out bad software to abandon next year, but most of us know that real value lies in the marathon of maintenance and careful conscious choices
@alice @cwebber agreed. We’ve been doing a technical migration at my workplace and we keep finding more and more issues caused by people moving fast and hurrying in the previous migration years ago + in the updates and changes made during the use of the tool in question.
Time was supposedly saved back then, but it was actually just passed down the line for us to deal with now. And this wasn’t even with LLMs, just general tech and coding laziness around a big enterprise org.
-
Economic value which is indeed not the best way to measure value
Personally I have yet to see a product where the value is increased by LLM.
@DevWouter
It has reduced exchange value due to the absence of scarcity, but it retains its use value. -
@cwebber LLM users are the same people who walk through modern art galleries saying "my kid could do that"
-
@alice @cwebber agreed. We’ve been doing a technical migration at my workplace and we keep finding more and more issues caused by people moving fast and hurrying in the previous migration years ago + in the updates and changes made during the use of the tool in question.
Time was supposedly saved back then, but it was actually just passed down the line for us to deal with now. And this wasn’t even with LLMs, just general tech and coding laziness around a big enterprise org.
@mariyadelano @alice @cwebber Most software is terrible. We build the same things over and over again, mostly poorly, and most people don't know any better. Even if you can see it, the tide is against you in most organizations. Is your NodeJS Kubernetes MongoDB Redis Temporal monstrosity 95% induced complexity and 99.9% wasted compute cycles and RAM? Sure. Can you practically change that? Not at most companies. Is this actually worse than writing it in vertically scaled Java on MySQL etc? Yes.
-
@mariyadelano @alice @cwebber Most software is terrible. We build the same things over and over again, mostly poorly, and most people don't know any better. Even if you can see it, the tide is against you in most organizations. Is your NodeJS Kubernetes MongoDB Redis Temporal monstrosity 95% induced complexity and 99.9% wasted compute cycles and RAM? Sure. Can you practically change that? Not at most companies. Is this actually worse than writing it in vertically scaled Java on MySQL etc? Yes.
@mirth @mariyadelano @alice so wise let's not try doing better
-
@mirth @mariyadelano @alice so wise let's not try doing better
@cwebber @mariyadelano @alice We absolutely should try to do better, and I appreciate everyone doing it. Every bit helps. My main point is the issues leading to slop proliferation are mostly structural and not new.
