Comment by shaky-carrousel
6 months ago
Yes, and my computer is using electricity I'm not directly generating with a bike, but all that is besides the point.
6 months ago
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.
Your concerns about centralization/monopolies are valid, though it's actually not very different than the situation with operating systems. As with Linux, there are open source LLMs which are very good, if not quite sota. There's also fierce competition between the commercial foundation model providers, so it's not like they can just raise prices whenever they want. So your criticism on this is fair but overly reductive and simplistic.
The idea that people using LLMs "won't learning anything" is just silly though. They're one of the best learning tools that humans have ever produced. You can use them to avoid learning, or you can use them to learn 10x faster.
Feel free to dismiss LLMs and write all your code by hand. It's up to you, and I'll even grant you there are some benefits, despite the significantly reduced productivity. But please don't act like doing so makes you a better progammer than others. That's the definition of gatekeeping. And again, we've been through all of this before with high level languages. It happens every time a new innovation makes programming more accessible and higher leverage.
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