It seems like the programming world is increasingly dividing into “LLMs for coding are at best marginally useful and produce huge tech debt” vs “LLMs are a game changing productivity boost”.
I truly don’t know how to account for the discrepancy, I can imagine many possible explanations.
But what really gets my goat is how political this debate is becoming. To the point that the productivity-camp, of which I’m a part, is being accused of deluding themselves.
I get that OpenAI has big ethical issues. And that there’s a bubble. And that ai is damaging education. And that it may cause all sorts of economic dislocation. (I emphatically Do Not get the doomers, give me a break).
But all those things don’t negate the simple fact that for many of us, LLMs are an amazing programming tool, and we’ve been around long enough to distinguish substance from illusion. I don’t need a study to confirm what’s right in front of me.
I’d love to know whether and to what extent the people for which AI has been a huge boost are those who were already producing slop, and now they have AI that can produce that slop much faster.
By framing it in such a way you are making personal and it becomes less about defending the process of using AI and more about defending their integrity as a developer. You will not get anything useful when someone responds in that way, just a heated argument where they feel deeply insulted and act accordingly.
Sheesh, how do you expect to be taken seriously when you sneer through gritted teeth like that?
I work with many developers of varying skill levels, all of which use AI. The only ones who have attempted to turn in slop are ones that basically turned out that they can’t code at all and didn’t keep their job long. Those who know what they’re doing, use it as a TOOL. They carefully build, modify, review and test everything and usually write about half of it themselves and it meets our strict standards.
Which you would know if you’d listened to what we’ve been telling you in good faith.
I truly don’t know how to account for the discrepancy, I can imagine many possible explanations.
But what really gets my goat is how political this debate is becoming. To the point that the productivity-camp, of which I’m a part, is being accused of deluding themselves.
I get that OpenAI has big ethical issues. And that there’s a bubble. And that ai is damaging education. And that it may cause all sorts of economic dislocation. (I emphatically Do Not get the doomers, give me a break).
But all those things don’t negate the simple fact that for many of us, LLMs are an amazing programming tool, and we’ve been around long enough to distinguish substance from illusion. I don’t need a study to confirm what’s right in front of me.