Comment by _heimdall
5 days ago
Is your entire job returning google results?
The point being made here is that a developer that can only do their primary job of coding via a hosted LLM is entirely dependent on a third party.
5 days ago
Is your entire job returning google results?
The point being made here is that a developer that can only do their primary job of coding via a hosted LLM is entirely dependent on a third party.
How much of useful programming work are you able to do without google? I don't think I even tried to do do any for the last 20 years.
You make a good point of course that independence is important. But primo, this ship sailed long ago, secundo, more than one party provides the service you depend on. If one failes you still have at least some alternatives.
I guess it depends on how you define "using google", but as I've progressed as a developer, I've found myself spending less time googling problems, and more time just looking at official documentation (maybe GitHub issues if I'm doing something weird). And yeah, I guess I technically use google to get to the documentation instead of typing in the URL, but that feels like splitting hairs.
And it's not like people weren't able to develop complicated software before the internet. They just had big documentation books that cost money and could get dated quickly. To be clear, having that same info a quick google search away is an improvement, and I'm not going to stop using google while it's available to me. But that doesn't mean we'd all be screwed if google stopped existing tomorrow.
Takes a little adjustment, but you can do quite a bit of good work without Google (or any search).
Spoken from a fair bit of experience doing software development in closed rooms with strict control of all digital devices (from your phone to your watch) and absolutely no external connections.
There are moments that are painful still, because you'll be trying to find a thing in a manual and you know a search can get it faster - but it's silly to imply this isn't possible.
I know it's possible with proper preparation. But I never had the strong need to prepare.
I can't say I've ever tried to intentionally not use google when working, unless I'm wanting to work offline entirely.
That said I only find google results somewhat helpful. Its a lot like LLM code (not surprising given how they're trained), I may find 5 answers online and one or two has a small piece of what I need. Ultimately that may say me a bit of time or give me an idea for something I hadn't thought of, but it isn't core to my daily work by any stretch.
Which developer jobs aren't dependent on many third parties?
There's a difference in being dependent on parts of the job versus the entire job.
I mostly write JS today and it either runs in browsers (dependencies) or a host like AAwS (dependencies). I use VS Codium and a handful of plugins (dependencies).
These all help me work efficiently when I'm coding, or help me avoid infrastructure issues that I don't want to deal with. Any one part is replaceable though, and more importantly any one part isn't responsible for doing my entire job of creating and shipping code.