Comment by Kon5ole
7 months ago
>Code without AI - sharp skills, your brain works and you come up with better solutions etc.
That train of thought leads to writing assembly language in ed. ;-)
I think developers as a group have a tendency to spend too much time "inside baseball" and forget what the tools we're good at are actually used for.
Farmers don't defend the scythe, spend time doing leetscythe katas or go to scything seminars. They think about the harvest.
(Ok, some farmers started the sport of Tractor Pulling when the tractor came along and forgot about the harvest but still!) :)
> That train of thought leads to writing assembly language in ed
Hard disagree, LLVM will always outperform me in writing assembly, it won't just give up and fail randomly when it meets a particularly non-trivial problem, causing me to write assembly by hand to fix it. If LLMs would be 100% reliable on the tasks I had to do, I don't think anyone here would seriously debate about the issue of mental attrition (i.e. you don't see people complaining about calculators). The problem is that in too many cases, the LLM will only get so far and you will still have to switch to doing actual programming to get the task finished and the worse you get at that last part the more your skillset converges to exactly the type of things an LLM (and therefore everyone else with a keyboard) can reliably do.
>The problem is that in too many cases, the LLM will only get so far and you will still have to switch to doing actual programming to get the task finished
The LLM makes mistakes sure and isn't a slam dunk tool like a compiler, but it could still save lots of time and be useful.
Some things are fine to let rot. Nobody should spend too much time learning Vue, React or Laravel, or even nhibernate, entity framework or structuremap, for example.
Such frameworks come and go, the knowledge has little value. Save brain cells for more important, long-lasting things instead. LLM's can certainly help with that.
> Some things are fine to let rot. Nobody should spend too much time learning Vue, React or Laravel, or even nhibernate, entity framework or structuremap, for example.
The way you phrase this you make it sound like an LLM can already solve every possible task you would ever get in Vue, React or Laravel but my entire point is that this is simply not true. As a consequence of this, whenever the LLM fails at a task (which gets more likely the more complex the task is) you will still need to know how Vue, React or Laravel work to actually finish your task but this is the exact knowledge you lose if you spend 80% of your day prompting instead of writing code. The more you rely on the LLM to write your code the more the code you are able to produce converges with the one that the LLM can put out.
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> That train of thought leads to writing assembly language in ed
you an pick any language you think is best atm. the point if you have to practice it.
use it or lose it
Losing Vue, React, Laravel, Rails, and a myriad of ORM's and other flash-in-the-pan implementations of larger ideas is fine. Lots of empty knowledge calories in IT.