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Comment by tomaytotomato

18 days ago

I would like to hijack the "high level language" term to mean dopamine hits from using an LLM.

"Generate a Frontend End for me now please so I don't need to think"

LLM starts outputting tokens

Dopamine hit to the brain as I get my reward without having to run npm and figure out what packages to use

Then out of a shadowy alleyway a man in a trenchcoat approaches

"Pssssttt, all the suckers are using that tool, come try some Opus 4.6"

"How much?"

"Oh that'll be $200.... and your muscle memory for running maven commands"

"Shut up and take my money"

----- 5 months later, washed up and disconnected from cloud LLMs ------

"Anyone got any spare tokens I could use?"

If you're disconnected from cloud LLM's you've got bigger problems than coding can solve lol

I can't tell if your general premise is serious or not, but in case it is: I get zero dopamine hits from using these tools.

My dopamine rush comes from solving a problem, learning something new, producing a particularly elegant and performant piece of code, etc. There's an aspect of hubris involved, to be sure.

Using a tool to produce the end result gives me no such satisfaction. It's akin to outsourcing my work to someone who can do it faster than me. If anything, I get cortisol hits when the tool doesn't follow my directions and produces garbage output, which I have to troubleshoot and fix myself.