Comment by skippyfish
1 day ago
I can't decide how I feel about this article. On one hand, it's great. It's great that the author wanted to get something done, and thanks to the marvels of modern tech, they could do it with very little effort.
But on the other hand... gosh, this was about the simplest software engineering challenge imaginable (toggle some I/O pins) and the simplest design task imaginable (make a featureless rectangular box). And the author - a technologist! - isn't just saying "I wanted to try out some new tech". They're saying "this was too hard, I needed help from an LLM" ("would absolutely not be able to meet this challenge", "hit another wall").
And that... I mean, I just don't know what to make of this. Were we always like this? Are LLMs making us like this? Is it good? Is it bad?... and don't give me the calculator analogy...
I have been stuck mentally on this article since it came out. Like, learning enough python to send the time to the display would still have made this a weekend project (I even went and found an adafruit 7 segment pi hat site and read their sample code). The effort is the interesting part to me, I want to read janky code that paints some kind a picture of someone learning. I don't care about finished, "polished" projects. I don't care that AI can know every single possible error that'll pop up and prevent it from happening, I want the clock to break and for the maker to say ohhhh yeah oops thats dumb.
I have had an eInk pi weather display in my living room for like 4 years now, pulling data from openweatherapi every half hour. It's my second favorite project (I made an eReader once... if you like waiting 5 seconds for a page to turn, do I have a product for you!) and I use it every single day. Sometimes it doesn't update when I didn't account for a possibility I didn't know about, and thats okay.
I get that this is someone writing for money and I have no experience in that realm, and I'm sure conde nast prefers faster writing for something less in depth... but I almost feel I should spend my monthly $3 elsewhere.
To be fair, I did the research, the BOM, the systemd service and timers, the packaging, most of the installer, and the deployment pipeline myself. It's just the python and the Fusion modeling I needed LLM help with. Coding beyond bash scripting is just not something I'm good at, and at 48, I've kind of accepted that it's not ever going to be no matter how hard I try.
Edit: retracted, but left up for context
The article itself appears to have had help from an LLM, too.
Go look at the editorial policy from Ars. Lee just writes like that; it's his style, it always has been.
nope. i was using em-dashes and semicolons before they were cool.
I believe you (and sorry, I do think I was wrong), but for the record I wasn't judging based on punctuation.
2 replies →
The line between programmers/SWE people and non-programmers got blurred thanks to LLMs.