Comment by rewilder12
17 hours ago
The original phrase "talk is cheap" is generally used to mean "it's easy to say a whole lot of shit and that talk often has no real value." So this cleaver headline is telling me the code has even less value than the talk. That alone betrays a level of ignorance I would expect from the author's work. I go to read the article and it confirmed my suspicion.
I think you are hyper-focusing on the headline, which is just a joke. The underlying article does not indicate to me that the author is ignorant of code, and if you care to look, they seem to have a substantial body of public open source contributions that proves this quite conclusively.
The underlying point is just that while it was very cognitively expensive to back up a good design with good code back in 2000, it's much cheaper now. And therefore, making sure the design is good is the more important part. That's it really.
And… the design (artistry) aspect is always the toughest. So explain to me, where do the returns come from if it is seemingly obviously only those who are very well informed of their domains/possess general intelligence can benefit from this tool?
Personally I don’t see it happening. This is the bitter reality the LLM producers have to face at some point.
> So explain to me, where do the returns come from if it is seemingly obviously only those who are very well informed of their domains/possess general intelligence can benefit from this tool?
I...don't think this is true at all. "The design of the car is more important than what specific material you use" does not mean that the material is unimportant", just that it is relatively* less important. To put a fake number on it, maybe 10% less important.
I think people who have domain knowledge and good coding skills will probably benefit the most from this LLM producer stuff.
Did you get very far in? They're referring to a pretty specific contextual usage of the phrase (Linus, back in 2000), not the adage as a whole.
I read the whole thing, and GP is right. Code is important, whether it is generated or handwritten. At least until true AGI is here.
I think I made it to about here haha
> One can no longer know whether such a repository was “vibe” coded by a non-technical person who has never written a single line of code, or an experienced developer, who may or may not have used LLM assistance.
I am talking about what it means to invert that phrase.
It's directly an inversion of https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/437173-talk-is-cheap-show-m...
Yes, the original phrase has a specific meaning. But in another context, "talk" is more important than the code.
In software development, code is in a real sense less important than the understanding and models that developers carry around in their heads. The code is, to use an unflattering metaphor, a kind of excrement of the process. It means nothing without a human interpreter, even if it has operational value. The model is never part of the implementation, because software apart from human observers is a purely syntactic construct, at best (even there, I would argue it isn't even that, as syntax belongs to the mind/language).
This has consequences for LLM use.