Comment by nz
14 hours ago
I don't know how to tell you this, but people have been writing custom software for personal use for decades. I've been doing it since at least 2009! I find it hard to believe that there is a demographic of people that were yearning to write code, but simply could not because they lacked LLMs. Is it the price? Are people simply too cheap to buy books? Or have they simply "forgotten" how to patiently and thoughtfully read them? Or has the quality of tutorials/documentation of languages/libraries/framework online decayed in the last decade? Or is it really that people have struggled to type characters of code into their text editors[1]?
Basically, I am prepared to accept that there is a friction that LLMs lubricate away, but what is the source of the friction, and why am I (and a bunch of other colleagues) not feeling that friction daily in our practice?
[1]: And if so, where did we programmers and computer scientists go wrong? Were subroutines and macros not sufficient for automating all of that excess typing? Were Emacs and Vim simply not saving enough keystrokes? Did people forget how to touch-type?
> Basically, I am prepared to accept that there is a friction that LLMs lubricate away, but what is the source of the friction, and why am I (and a bunch of other colleagues) not feeling that friction daily in our practice?
You must be extremely talented and fast if LLMs make no difference for you.
For people like me though, it's another story: I've been doing this professionally for 25 years and of course, like many, I have been writing custom software for my own use all this time, on personal time. But with LLMs I get better results, faster and with very little effort. And that is the difference between another item in my list of unfinished software that consumed too much of my weekends and a cool utility/toy/useful thing I got after a few fun and interesting chat sessions.
> I find it hard to believe that there is a demographic of people that were yearning to write code, but simply could not because they lacked LLMs.
We didn't lack LLMs, we lacked time and energy.
I still vaguely remember how difficult man pages were to understand when I first started reading them. I'm pretty sure the biggest obstacle is the fact that most documentation is written for people who already know the standard computer science terminology. I have a generally negative opinion of LLMs, but one thing they do very well is function as a "reverse dictionary". You can input a idiosyncratic description of something you want and get the standard terminology. This is a new and valuable capability.
There is a universe out there, where most of the world is reading Solaris man pages, instead of Linux man pages. Whatever your thoughts on the Solaris OS, I think it is fair to say that no operating system has ever matched the quality of its man pages.
Interestingly, I also converged on the "reverse dictionary" usage of LLMs, in around 2024[1], mostly to indulge in (human) language-learning.
An excerpt from the post below:
``` It is a phenomenal reverse dictionary (i.e. which English words mean "of a specific but unspecified character, quality, or degree"). It not only works for English, but also for Esperanto (i.e. which Esperanto words mean "of a specific but unspecified character, quality, or degree"), as well as my own obscure native language. This is a huge time-saver when learning languages (normal dictionaries won't cut it, and bi-lingual dictionaries are limited, if they are available at all). Even if you are just using a language you are fluent in, a reverse-dictionary-prompt can help you find words and usages, and can also help you find "dark spots" in the language's lexicon. ```
[1]: https://galacticbeyond.com/chat-room-dispatches-intelligence...
> most documentation is written for people who already know the standard computer science terminology
Not really. It's probably complexity for the sake of it in some cases. Also it's frequently ambiguous, and I'm really not sure why: it looks like some developers lack the basic logic (?!).
I've commented on this subject before, but the fact of the matter is that kids getting into high tech and programming mostly don't read books anymore. How do I know? Recently I was hanging out with a bunch of high school students who asked me how I learned. I said it was mostly via books and man pages. "Yeah, don't sleep on high quality written material. O'Reilly. Wiley. Addison-Wesley. Manning. MIT. No Starch Press. &c..."
Well. You should have seen the look on their faces. I might as well have morphed into the Steve Buscemi meme "How do you do, fellow kids?" They looked at me like I was a total relic or greybeard and said things like "Nah, nobody reads tech books anymore; I learned Typescript from YouTube videos."
Already in 2008, as a millennial teen without internet at home, I was learning C# and XNA without a single book, just tutorials and official docs I downloaded from the library alongside Visual Studio Express. I couldn't have afforded books on it anyway, but I can't imagine teens in 2026 using anything other than Youtube and some tutorials to learn this stuff.
I learned programming from tutorials :) Only after I kept encountering terms in tutorials (long after I was building (badly organized) programs) that I didn't understand well did I decide to read my first book, K&R's C. This was when animated gifs were a novelty not worth the data transfer time.
I think every generation feels like their way of learning was the best, but we all make it work. There was a time when the architects of systems directly tutored programmers on how to write programs.
That has been the case for a decade
This is the best use case of LLMs, the one I use it the most for.
> I find it hard to believe that there is a demographic of people that were yearning to write code, but simply could not because they lacked LLMs. Is it the price?
Yes, because the price is measured in time.
With LLM tooling I’ve churned out idiosyncratic tools that fit my use cases quickly. Takes maybe a day instead of a week. A week instead of months. The fast turnaround changes the economics of writing custom tools for myself.
I have been writing my own custom software for myself for over 30 years. But in the last six months I have written a lot more of it because the language models make it so much faster and easier to do so.
Not speaking for the OP. But my biggest constraint is time. Now with agentic coding, I can work in 5 to 15 minute bursts a few times/day, and make meaningful progress on projects, where as before I would have never been able to context shift from my day job long enough on a personal project.
Yep! Time was the biggest factor. I could have created that one tool I had for years been wanting to make, but tech moves fast, and I have a job and a family and a passion for music and yadda yadda yadda. AI has been a game changer for actually accomplishing big dreams I just didn't have the time to bring about to fruition.
Given how often younger people find my typing speed startling, I think it has been somewhat forgotten (US high schools had "keyboarding" classes at one point but that seems to have fallen off...)
Seriously agree. I am wildly overeducated and I often think the most useful class I ever took in high school was my senior year elective for a typing class. On old IBM typewriters. And the only class I took in high school with non-honors kids. Typing insanely fast, especially for someone who is a fast thinker, is a bit of a magic power in itself.
Well, I’ve been writing code for decades so I know because there was a time ( when I was younger ) where I did just this.
I also know that these days, for all kinds of reasons, I do not have the time to write the tools I’m writing now without AI. I don’t lack the ability, and I could - it will simply be multi months side projects that I can’t / won’t complete.
> I don't know how to tell you this, but people have been writing custom software for personal use for decades. I've been doing it since at least 2009!
GP never claimed otherwise.
As for the rest of your comment, it's frankly a bit patronising: are people too cheap, are people too lazy to read, are people unable to type...?
No, people are busy, a fact which GP made abundantly clear in the very first paragraph.
> I would never have done this if it weren’t for AI - I simply don’t have the time otherwise.
I have written multiple IRC bots in the last 20+ years. It's my go-to project to test a new language, mostly because I know the protocol inside and out and it has some gotchas that languages can't handle comfortably (managing a bunch of open TCP sockets with threads/subprocesses mostly).
Have I tried to write my own IRC client yet? Nope. Because even though I know how to, the time spent wouldn't have been worth it. Getting from zero to feature parity would've taken me weeks or months of evenings doing nothing else.
I've got my own irccloud/thelounge clone running now, took me two weeks of calendar time and I spent maybe 6-7 evenings on it and a few hare-brained ideas with Claude on my phone.
The amount of "lubrication" LLMs have given me in going from idea to something good enough just for me is completely bonkers.
There's a whole lot of people who want software to do certain things but whos job isn't programming and life requirements don't allow the time for all the book reading, tutorial running, and practice to write useful code.
I'm a long time ops guy. I script, but I spend most of my time configuring, patch testing, and keeping the low level infra running much of which doesn't require "coding" per say. Infra as code is in the grand scheme relatively new and still not ubiquitous despite what silicon valley would have you believe. I never had a need to learn to code to a level to do many of the things I'd like to see happen and find useful. Now I can make those software desires a reality without having to alter my career, preferred hobbies, or much of anything else about my life.
>Are people simply too cheap to buy books?
Yes, definitely, though I'm unsure what it means being cheap here.
Not everyone has SV incomes and infinite time to read all the books that would allow to buy, let alone integrate the lessons at a practical implementation level. Plus people might have other interest in life, and family and friends they want to dedicate time and warm attention to.
Speaking for myself, it's less of a yearning to write more code, than it is a yearning for tools that work a specific way.
I write plenty of code at my job, and generally don't have the desire to write more code as a hobby, except in rare cases when the mood really strikes.