Comment by vidarh
16 days ago
> Did you also notice the evolution of average developers over time? I mean, if you take code from a developer ten years ago and compare it with their output now, you can see improvement.
This makes little sense to me. Yes, individual developers gets better. I've seen little to no evidence that the average developer has gotten better.
> However, LLMs might reduce that effort to zero — we just don't know how developers will look after ten years of using LLMs now.
It might reduce that effort to zero from the same people who have always invested the bare minimum of effort to hold down a job. Most of them don't advance today either, and most of them will deliver vastly better results if they lean heavily on LLMs. On the high end, what I see experienced developers do with LLMs involves a whole lot of learning, and will continue to involve a whole lot of learning for many years, just like with any other tool.
After 30 years in front of the desktop, we are processing dopamine differently.
When I speak about 10 years from now, I’m referring to who will become an average developer if we replace the real coding experience learning curve with LLMs from day one.
I also hear a lot of tool analogies — tractors for developers, etc. But every tool, without an exception, provides replicable results. In the case of LLMs, however, repeatable results are highly questionable, so it seems premature to me to treat LLMs in the same way as any other tool.
Right, I've seen a lot of facile comparisons to calculators.
It may be true that a cohort of teachers were wrong (on more than one level) when they chastised students with "you need to learn this because you won't always have a calculator"... However calculators have some essential qualities which LLM's don't, and if calculators lacked those qualities we wouldn't be using them the way we do.
In particular, being able to trust (and verify) that it'll do a well-defined, predictable, and repeatable task that can be wrapped into a strong abstraction.
> if we replace the real coding experience learning curve with LLMs from day one.
People will learn different things. They will still learn. Most developers I've hired over the years do not know assembly. Many do not know a low-level language like C. That is a downside if they need to write assembly, but most of them never do (and incidentally, Opus knows x86 assembly better than me, knows gdb better than me; it's still not good at writing large assembly programs). It does not make them worse developers in most respects, and by the time they have 30 years experience the things they learn instead will likely be far more useful than many of the things I've spent years learning.
> But every tool, without an exception, provides replicable results.
This is just sheer nonsense, and if you genuinely believe this, it suggests to me a lack of exposure to the real world.
My point is not what is learned but how. Debugging, reading errors, understanding how things put together — that is the learning.
You haven't replaced assembler with C here, you've replaced programming with Scrabble.