Comment by danenania

6 months ago

Unless you're writing machine code, you aren't really writing your own code either. You're giving high level instructions, which depend on many complex systems built by thousands of engineers to actually run.

Yes, and my computer is using electricity I'm not directly generating with a bike, but all that is besides the point.

  • Yeah you depend on many layers of infrastructure as well for that electricity. It’s exactly the point.

    All the criticisms you level at people coding with LLMs apply just as much to your artisanal hand-sculpted code that you’re so proud of.

    • It seems like you are more interested on being snarky than in having a conversation, but I'll try. You are being nitpicky by saying I depend on external systems. Of course we depend on external systems. This is a civilization. At the end of the day we depend on many things. But until now, once we had set up a computer, we did not depend on anything but free resources to code.

      You can get a computer from other person, install linux and you can start to code. We can get documentation from internet freely. What we are doing right now is giving up this ability by relying on a very centralized service.

      This is going to bite us. New programmers are not going to really learn anything, but how to ask a LLM. And when (not if) the companies in charge of the LLMs decide to raise the price, everyone will pay.

      New programmers are not going to ask new questions in forums, because they will work it out the answers with their LLM, and those sessions will be used by the owners to improve the LLM. We are centralizing knowledge and abilities.

      And let's not forget the huge energy bill all this LLM dancing is having. People is spending gigawatts of energy asking over and over and over the same questions to an LLM. This is incredibly wasteful.

      But yeah, this is all about my "artisanal hand-sculpted code that you’re so proud of". Hopefully you didn't use a LLM to write that line. It would have been a waste.

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