Comment by tarsinge
3 months ago
I don't know, the kind of developers doing this are the same that would copy paste from stack overflow in the past. Because if you are interested in knowledge and human experience, LLMs or not you are curious about what you read and take ownership of what you produce. In the past these developers would have created the same slop but at a much slower pace, LLMs are just enabling them to do it faster.
It's the speed that stops you learning anything. Piecing together a dozen scripts from a dozen sources and making them work requires some work. You have to debug it. Some of this knowledge sticks.
It's not just a tech thing. Kid's learning suffering at their ability to just crank out essays they've never even read.
LLMs and AI are getting better. We doomers aren't decrying the technical advances they're making, we're appalled at the human cost of giving people a knowledge-free route through life.
Not just knowledge free, but thought free. Instead of thinking deeply about something and coming to a conclusion yourself, just offload it to an AI to do it for you. Something challenges you in life? No worries, AI is here. Not just to answer your questions, but think for you. What kind of world is that? What kind of society will that lead to?
I set up opnsense and xcp-ng. The idea thay I now don't understand those front ends is absurd. I'd already learned the underlying networking and Linux stuff years ago I just needed to know where the right nibs are.
And you can easily learn deeply with AI just ask it deeper questions. I do this all the time. I did this several times in this network setup when I did encounter something I didn't understand. If you aren't curious you won't learn, if you are you'll learn faster than any other method out there.
Similar things were said about the calculator.
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I think what I'll miss from the SO approach to research is encountering that wall of text someone bothered to post giving a deep explanation of the problem space and potential solutions. Sometimes I just needed the fast answer to some configuration problem, but it was always worth the extra 20-30 minutes to read through and really understand those high effort contributions.
Nobody is writing a wall of text about opnsense rules or unbound checkboxes. I already knew the fundamentals I just wanted to get it done. I'm not a novice I've been using firewalls forever. Xcp-ng for half a decade. I just needed clarification on the differences.