Comment by righthand
7 hours ago
Yep it’s pretty depressing all around. Even when the truth is revealed about the output of an Llm (not quality, full of errors, made up details, nonsense code, etc), people are still claiming it as a better way of working because they had a chat with it. There is very little room for anyone not interested in slop.
I was recently replaced by a young developer and the only thing that keeps me smiling is that they still haven’t fixed the part of the application I raised concerns about (because the young dev decided to write on a fresh non-compatible stack even after my warnings). I hope eventually it leads to their own loss of career since that’s what they did to me. All of that to say that Llms have made people into over confident morons.
Like the old joke about alcohol not "turning" someone into a jerk, but instead revealing the jerk that's been hiding all along, I think the same is true for the idea that LLMs are "turning" people into overconfident morons. I don't believe these people are being changed, I think it's how they always were, and now it's easier to see.
:/ The celebration of loss of rigor does seem like revealed preference.
Yes that is probably a better way of putting it. We are all overconfident morons until we learn things. Now society has subtracted knowledge share and gain from the equation.
Eh, but so what? Even if everyone really was a jerk, something holding them back from revealing it was still valuable.
> All of that to say that Llms have made people into over confident morons
My manager does not have a software background. Initially he used to come to me with an idea and we used to discuss on how we can technically implement it. He used to value what I had to say. Now he talks to copilot, come up with these grand ideas, dumps all that on our heads in a 30 min meeting and ask what do you think about it?
"Sounds plausible, boss!"
How did this come around? the young developer was just faster overall? or were they cheaper?
My original manager left and my coworker was promoted. They immediately turned face away from the team. They fostered a hostile environment and made sure to not make decisions but instead let our team fight amongst themselves. Then they fired the other two team members without a reason and loaded all the work on to me. Then they would waver between I wasn’t working fast enough and “we can slow down if you need more time” for months while pushing back projects and deadlines because they failed to plan for any of those projects. I tried making amends and focusing on work and not the drama, but they wouldn’t have it. Then they started talking about hiring two new juniors for the team. Which I understood to mean they were going to replace me. When one of the juniors started that person was kept away from me and did not meet with me for any onboarding or collaboration. Instead talking to my manager only. Once this happened I still tried to be invested in the projects and pairing with the other new hire. Eventually though a deadline came and I had to explain why the code wasn’t ready when they dropped the new stack they built in private on me days before things were due.
I have no opposition to a new stack but our team already had 6 different projects, two of which were the previous teams next-gen projects. I didn’t want to increase the maintenance surface than we already had with 3 different wordpress sites, 2 nextjs next gen sites, 1 next gen site, and now the new guy’s next project built on vite.
They have a PoC of the new site they released for their semi-annual conferences. It does not work, looks pretty but does not work (essentially because vite has no server API).
So yes, it was an operating capital reduction measure or wage stagnation or whatever you want to call it. I’ve never had a manager that didn’t go to bat for me or passed blame for their failings onto me until that job. Apparently C-suite had developed a culture for pointing fingers.