Comment by tptacek
1 year ago
You're giving the game away when you talk about the joy LLMs are robbing from you. I think we all intuit why people don't like the idea of big parts of their jobs being automated away! But that's not an argument on the merits. Our entire field is premised on automating people's jobs away, so it's always a little rich to hear programmers kvetching about it being done to them.
I naively bought into the idea of a future where the computers do the stuff we’re bad at and we get to focus on the cool human stuff we enjoy. If these LLMs were truly incredible at doing my job I’d pack it up and find something else to do, but for now I’m wholly unimpressed, despite what management seems to see in it.
Well, I've spent my entire career writing software, starting in C in the 1990s, and what I'm seeing on my dev laptop is basically science fiction as far as I'm concerned.
Hey both things can be true. It’s a long ways from the AI renaissances of the past. There’s areas LLMs make a lot of sense. I just don’t find them to be great pair programming partners yet.
4 replies →
I love the way you described it :)
We get to do cool stuff still, by instructing the LLM how to build such cool stuff.
> Our entire field is premised on automating people's jobs away, so it's always a little rich to hear programmers kvetching about it being done to them.
Watch out, you’re giving your game away.
My job is about enabling analysis that was previously done ad hoc and informally. If I’m harming people then that’s something I have to take responsibility for, but it’s also caused not by my direct contribution but by the larger system that I’m working within.
I expressively don’t want to automate away work when that will just result in more profit for private owners and less income for regular working people.[1] And I also don’t want to automate work if that means shifting drudgery to some worker to fill in that freed up time.
And how does this contradict what “we” are doing and stand for!? We criticize technology on this board all the time!
But it’s nice to have the priorities of such a prominent member on the record.
[1] But I DO want to automate work in the hypothetical society where we all own the automation and thus the only thing we are deprived of is drudgery.