Writing code with an LLM is often actually less productive than writing without.

Sure for some small tasks it might poop out an answer real quick and it may look like something that’s good. But it only looks like it, checking if it is actually good can be pretty hard. It is much harder to read and understand code, than it is to write it. And in cases where a single character is the difference between having a security issue and not having one, it’s very hard to spot those mistakes. People who say they code faster with an LLM just blindly accept the given answer, maybe with a quick glance and some simple testing. Not in depth code review, which is hard and costs time.

Then there’s all the cases where the LLM messes up and doesn’t give a good answer, even after repeated back and forth. Once the thing is stuck in an incorrect solution, it’s very hard to get it out of there. Especially once the context window runs out, it becomes a nightmare after that. It will say something like “Summarizing conversation”, which means it deletes lines from the conversation that are deemed superfluous, even if those are critical requirement descriptions.

There’s also the issue where an LLM simply can’t do a large complex task. They’ve tried to fix this with agents and planning mode and such. Breaking everything down into smaller and smaller parts, so it can be handled. But with nothing keeping the overview of the mismatched set of nonsense it produces. Something a real coder is expected to handle just fine.

The models are also always trained a while ago, which can be really annoying when working with something like Angular. There are frequent updates to Angular and those usually have breaking changes, updated best practices and can even be entire paradigm shifts. The AI simply doesn’t know what to do with the new version, since it was trained before that. And it will spit out Stackoverflow answers from 2018, especially the ones with comments saying to never ever do that.

There’s also so much more to being a good software developer than just writing the code. The LLM can’t do any of those other things, it can just write the code. And by not writing the code ourselves, we are losing an important part of the process. And that’s a muscle that needs flexing, or skills rust and go away.

And now they’ve poisoned the well, flooding the internet with AI slop and in doing so destroying it. Website traffic has gone up, but actual human visits have gone down. Good luck training new models on that garbage heap of data. Which might be fine for now, but as new versions of stuff gets released, the LLM will get more and more out of date.

I disagree about this:

And yet here we are. The worst fact about these tools is that they work. They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.

I dealt with apache santuario for some xmldsign code and damn, documentation is horrible, only some things in stack overflow worked, but the java docs saved me, I just needed to think about it and rewrite, rewrite and rewrite so the code was legible. Whenever I asked any LLM, they “wrote” code directly from 2005, junior level style, using code patterns directly from the depths of time.

Edit: These LLMs are dumb as fuck, any non standard thing or completely new things they just shit their datacenter pants and just throws garbage at the screen.

But then your junior colleagues will eventually code circles around you…

Probably not. I just ran into a dude who suggested using LLMs to fix misplaced braces in source code.

i’m in embedded systems. i’ve yet to see an llm manage to do anything even remotely useful in anything close to my field. and i don’t predict them being able to anytime soon, because everything is proprietary and locked down to single vendors.

if you don’t believe me, wait six months

We are now on year…three? Of this mantra.

A junior with a LLM is like a gorilla with a sledge hammer. Good luck getting to to do anything useful. You’ll need even more luck getting to not break anything.

I grieve. I came to software development because I wanted to write. I studied literature in school, and I wanted to put pen to paper, to read and write and to communicate with other humans about the things that matter to me. But the academy graduates far more literature students than there are positions for writers and teachers, and the market promised me that if I learned to write code instead of human language, I would never want for a steady paycheck. And so I dug in, creating open source projects on GitHub to make a portfolio, and reassuring myself that software development was primarily a way that humans communicated with each other about how we want the systems around us to work. I had hope — I could write C# to talk to my coworkers about how health care should work, or Java to talk about how financial systems should work, or JavaScript to talk about how people should find jobs, and the fact that a computer was eavesdropping was incidental to the project.

And I think what is so mournful for me is that my voice is preserved forever in these LLMs. They’ve scraped everything I’ve ever done, and joined me into the shared song of all of humanity and lowered the barriers to entry for new software developers and everything should be beautiful and shared, but instead of it being the great equalizer that allows users to finally generate the custom software for themselves they’ve always wanted, and never been able to articulate to me, we’ve stolen the entire intellectual history of the human race to help a small cadre of fascists burn the planet. I fell for it, completely, and that’s what I grieve for most.

I mourn it too, because there are dumbasses like this who are buying the hype and setting the industry back by decades as a result.

LOL