I generally agree with this article and appreciate the articulation of some points that were in my head but not well formed.

That said, practically speaking, you can just ignore the evangelists and even use it as a signal for people you should ignore.

The unfortunate thing is how it's affecting our careers, since it's apparently so alluring for Management types to buy the hype and start trying to micro manage devs.

See for some, "over time" means "the next guy's problem". That is true before LLMs of course. And that's even the prevailing school of thought in most organizations. And to some extent it is correct to accept some tech debt because otherwise you'll never get anything done.

For those who have been around a while, dealing with the "over time" of yesteryear is a daily occurrence. So naturally they are more averse to it. And LLMs seem to dramatically shorten the duration of "over time".

Is that a long winded way of saying yes?

It's not fans that he's criticizing but evangelists.

Thanks for pointing it out. I actually meant evangelists

Ok, then as a self described LLM evangelist, what motivates you to preach about LLM coding instead of just, y'know, doing it in private?

It would feel selfish for me not to help other people figure this stuff out.

Probably some of the same things that have always motivated people to explore and then write about their findings for others.

Do you mind when people do this about topics you find interesting? If not, why are you even on HN?

"insecure" in the title didn't set the tone for you?

I think this is an opportunity for that bell curve/enlightenment meme. Of course as you get a little past junior, you often get hung up on the best way of doing things without worrying about best being the enemy of good enough. But truly senior devs know the difference. And those are the ones that by and large still think LLMs are bad at generating code where quality (reliability, sustainability, security, etc) matters. Everyone admits that LLMs are good for low stakes code.

It's definitely testing the waters.

Well Amazon makes it take way less time to buy something (almost anything). I dont have to waste time and money going to the hardware store, it only takes 90 seconds of my time and the price including shipping is less than what the hardware store wants to charge, with its rent and utilities and so on to cover. Amazon cut out a middleman between the warehouse and the household. It made things more efficient, and I can use the time and money savings to spend more money or work harder at my job. (I for one do spend more hours working if I have more time in my day. Not everyone is like this.)

AI could do the same thing. It could cut 90 seconds down to... 10 seconds? It doesn't seem like the same impact as Amazon, where an hour's investment became 90 seconds. And I can't see how AI shopping is going to save me money here. There's no middleman to cut out, except maybe some web site storefront?? There's also a huge downside: with Amazon, I suddenly had access to 100 different pairs of scissors to choose from, instead of the 2 or 3 I could find in Staples. That was a plus. With AI shopping, suddenly I'm down to one choice: whatever Chat chooses for me. If I want to have a say in which pair of scissors I buy, I'm back to shopping for myself.

A trillion dollar valuation doesn't imply there's actually a trillion dollars there. It's just the last price the stock sold for, times the shares in existence.

If Elon tried to sell every share of Tesla tomorrow, he would get a lot less than the face value of all his shares.

So in other words, there doesn't need to be that much currency, just that much hype.