Comment by bambax
1 day ago
> code that would have taken me years of work to produce without LLMs
As you might suspect, this is what I have an issue with. Without LLMs, isn't it possible or even likely that that code wouldn't have been written at all, and wouldn't have been missed? If LLMs are mostly used to produce throwaway prototypes then it's a stretch to say that's money well spent.
If indeed it let you advance your main product much faster then sure it's a different story. You're the judge of that. It's hard to see the impact from the consumer side; everything is still broken and no extraordinary app seems to be emerging. Maybe it's just a question of time. We'll see.
I've thought about this a lot. I am very confident that the way I use LLMs is both accelerating progress on my core projects (here's a substantial, reviewed PR I landed just yesterday https://github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/2741) and helping me create plenty of projects that otherwise would not have existed.
The point being made by GP was that your projects have no value and their non-existence wouldn't be a negative to this world.
And that is likely a fair assessment, though I understand perfectly the feeling that you have that you are accomplishing great(er) things thanks to AI.
I was certainly not saying that all the author's projects, in general, have no value! That would be rude, mean and most of all, incorrect.
But yes, it's likely that the ease of which code can now be outout lets us produce lots of unnecessary code just because we can, and the author says as much in a below comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48303890
I certainly hope that's not true, given that I've dedicated 7+ years to my main open source projects at this point.
I take some reassurance from knowing that they are indeed used by real people to solve real problems though.
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This is the economic theory of value creation though - arguably the world is better off because new projects can be created, and they are marginally cheaper than they would have been previously
I’m watching to see what happens to big enterprise software contracts. Why pay some vendor $800k annually for something a couple mid-level devs can replace—-and tailor closely to your needs——by leveraging AI.
Open source software changed the world. AI that will cheaply write whatever you want in a few days will also change the world.