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Comment by tedious-coder

6 days ago

I agree with your assessment of the value of the skills, at least for the time being. What I dislike is the way that we are being encouraged to work now. I simply do not find any joy, at all, in reviewing LLM-written code and then typing in the next prompt.

A sentiment I see often is that it's work, it's not supposed to be fun, and you work at the pleasure of the employer. And I accept that. But I still am really just crushingly sad that this is what my job is becoming.

In the article, Thomas wrote:

> LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google. They look things up themselves. Most importantly, they don’t get tired; they’re immune to inertia.

I see this as a massive downside, because I loved writing tedious code. I loved reading docs on something I previously didn't understand. I loved forming the mental models strong enough to say "yeah I see why that's there" in the previously-inscrutable APIs of the frameworks and such that I was using. It was precisely the _way_ that I approached that work that allowed for that knowledge to accrue. It was because I almost never just copy/pasted something without spending a lot of time to understand it.

I do some of the same with ChatGPT. I type the code in myself after trying to internalize the ChatGPT response. But even that is starting to feel like company time-theft, as the attitude is shifting even further away from "knowing how to do things is good" toward "getting shit done is all that matters."