Comment by throwaway31131
2 days ago
I could never relate to the programmers who wrote code for the sake of writing code. I write a lot of code, but for me the code is a means, not an end.
So I look at tools like LLMs as just the latest incarnation of tools to reduce the number of hours the human has to spend to get to the end.
When I very first started programming, a very long time ago, the programmer actually had to consider where in memory, like at what physical address, things were. Then tools came along and it’s not a thing. You were not a programmer unless you knew all about sorting and the many algorithms and tradeoffs involved. Now people call sort() and it’s fine. Now we have LLMs. For some things people think they’re great. Me personally I have not found utility in them yet (mostly because I don’t work on web, front end, or in python) but I can see the potential. But dynamic loaders and sort() didn’t replace me, I’m sure LLMs won’t either, and I’ll be grateful if it helps me get to the end with less time invested.
Yeah, this,
LLMs to me are primarily:
1. A way to get over writers block; they can quickly get the first draft down, which I can then iterate on; I’m one of those people who generally first implement something in a dirty way just to get it working, and then do a couple more iterations / rewrites on it, so this suits my workflow perfectly. Same for writing a first draft of a design doc based on my brain dump.
2. A faster keyboard.
Generally, both of these mean that energetically, coding is quite a bit less mentally tiring for me, and I can spend more energy on the important/hard things.