Comment by mediaman
6 days ago
If an LLM improves coding productivity, and it is better at one language than another, then at the margin it will affect which language you may choose.
At the margin means that both languages, or frameworks or whatever, are reasonably appropriate for the task at hand. If you are writing firmware for a robot, then the LLM will be less helpful, and a language such as Python or JS which the LLM is good at is useless.
But Thomas's point is that arguing that LLMs are not useful for all languages is not the same as saying that are not useful for any language.
If you believe that LLM competencies are not actually becoming drivers in what web frameworks people are using, for example, you need to open your eyes and recognize what is happening instead of what you think should be happening.
(I write this as someone who prefers SvelteJS over React - but LLM's React output is much better. This has become kind of an issue over the last few years.)
I'm a little (not a lot) concerned that this will accelerate the adoption of languages and frameworks based on their popularity and bury away interesting new abstractions and approaches from unknown languages and frameworks.
Taking your react example, then if we we're a couple years ahead on LLMs, jQuery might now be the preferred tool due to AI adoption through consumption.
You can apply this to other fields too. It's quite possible that AIs will make movies, but the only reliably well produced ones will be superhero movies... (I'm exaggerating for effect)
Could AI be the next Cavendish banana? I'm probably being a bit silly though...
> I'm a little ... concerned that this will accelerate the adoption of languages and frameworks based on their popularity and bury away interesting new abstractions and approaches...
I'd argue that the Web development world has been choosing tooling based largely on popularity for like at least a decade now. I can't see how tooling selection could possibly get any worse for that section of the profession.
I disagree. There’s a ton of diversity in web development currently. I don’t think there’s ever been so many language and framework choices to build a web app.
The argument is that we lose this diversity as more people rely on AI and choose what AI prefers.
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