What LLMs revealed is how many people in our industry don’t like to code.
It’s intriguing that now they claim and showcase what they “built with Claude”, whereas usually that means they generated a PoC.
It’s funny, as people still focus on how they’re building, so it’s all about the code. And if that’s the message sent outside, together with the thought that LLMs are already better than “average coder Joe”, then the logical follow-up question is: why do we need those humans in the loop?
Not surprising if you’ve been in computing since before the dot-com boom.
In the 80s it was the finance industry that attracted all the yuppies because it was where the money was. Do you think any of those stock traders actually care about economics, supply chains or business development outside of it being a vehicle for them to make wads of cash? Of course not.
As soon as the internet demonstrated its financial potential, all the money-chasers looking for a career path became “web developers” and moved to Silicon Valley. Once smartphone app stores appeared, they all went into “app development.”
These people never cared about the technology, they just care about getting their retirement.
Actually caring about coding? That’s only for the real nerds.
There’s a guy in my niche showcasing his website “built with Claude”. Built in a couple weeks. Irks the hell out of me. Looks nice on the surface. Meanwhile, I’m building from scratch and spending half a year.
Why are you building your website? You need to do something specific? You can use AI. Make the site, use it, forget about it.
You want to learn new tools? You just like coding? You want to grow and maintain the app? Write it yourself. You will learn, have fun and end up with something you can maintain for long time.
Coding is not a race. Yes, people will make simple apps faster with AI but making something that works fast is not always the goal.
For what it’s worth, when they eventually raise the prices on it, you’d be the one not losing money for every line you write.
Except you can already download and run models on your local machine for free with ollama. Price raising might at least calm the AI craze with the normies though. Probably not with developers who know how to run LLMs locally.
Quality of output differs by a lot for local models, but I also think that local should be the way forward
*scratches neck …yall got anymore of them tokens?
I wouldn’t just call it “don’t like to code”. It is also related to ratio of creative vs mundane coding tasks, how much you are allowed to work on stuff that you find interesting, how over worked you are, etc etc.
I generally agree with what the post is saying but this part
I think that we’ll still be coding, but with some other layer, as LLMs are good with structured input, like programming languages. So we might need other programming languages than we have atm. Might we need different tools to evaluate LLMs’ output to make it deterministic? Might we need a different approach for engineering to make it scalable? Might we need more?
I just don’t see this happening to be honest. It’s the same thing people keep claiming about “prompts replacing code”
Let’s say you do make it deterministic. Then why do you need the LLM for it? You can just build a plain old compiler for it. Why add Anthropic or Open AI as an expensive middleman to your operations. There’s already a lot of admin plugins that will set up entire routes and pages based off of a db model. The reason people don’t purely work off of those is the world isn’t modeled off of simple CRUD. There are so many edge cases and requirements that aren’t easy to model in a sweeping generalization that you need some way of fine tuning that.
So if you scrap that you’re back to “prompts as code”. Which also sucks.
If you have a PR change that’s breaking production and the only change is to a prompt
Make the popup background
redblueHow the hell do you triage what went wrong? Do you revert and roll the dice that the LLM is gonna get it right? No one in their right mind would ever think this is okay in a production setting?
I don’t want to say we’ll never have a higher level extraction, but I don’t think it’ll be due to LLMs.
Hasn’t this been obvious for a long time? I always had some side projects I would work on after work because I like the creativity involved but most devs I know don’t touch any code unless they are paid to do so.
I don’t have the energy to do that anymore.
Funny, LLMs actually gave me the time and energy to move forward with a lot of my personal projects. It’s a lot more fun when I don’t have to lose time investigating why some component doesn’t work, or build oauth for the gazillionth time
My core issue with manual coding.
Finding answers and solutions.
You get tons out outdated shit becsuse searxhbis broken as fuck.
Or worse, you end up on StackOverflow which is full of the biggest most useless fucking assholes on the planet for a variety of reasons, most of which boil down to “Younare a fucking idiot for not being an expert on every nuanced bull shit part of your chosen language, including choosing that language in the first place because its not this other language.”
