Like imagine if your hobby was cooking, but you hated the cleanup. If you buy a robot that automates the fun part at the cost of making twice the mess, that is not a good trade off no matter how many extra cookies you end up with.
We’re kind of at the fast food point: before LLMs, bring successful at all in software required some level of skill (witness all of the companies getting very expensive write-offs from off-shoring or big consultancies trying to save on payroll vs. staff), kind of like how the small cafe/bakery model needed to have at least some level of craft to have something people would buy before the option of making food at a factory and shipping it became an option.
The workers will see the fun evaporate but now they have to clean 10x cookie trays in the same 8 hours.
I'm lurking around the OpenBSD mailing list and it seems that code review is where collaboration starts. You send a patch, explain its purpose, people try it out and comment. If it's OK (various factors decide that), it's imported inside the codebase.
The main issue in corporate settings is that the author of the PR wants to browbeat you into accepting his/her changes. Either directly or by appealing to the manager. They don't want collaboration, they just see you as the blocker between them and the "Done" status on the ticket.
That’s an interesting framing. I’m not sure I agree with your strong conclusion but that’s mostly because I think there’s a second axis about maintenance – you can make a grand strategy game in a couple months but it’s harder to make it balanced, fun, and to keep shipping updates which players like. A prototype or hobby experiment doesn’t have that problem nearly as much and I think that’s where we see such bimodal reactions where some people think it’s a huge productivity boost and others see modest or even negative results.
An online community works when participants learn and share knowledge gained. Contests, with self or others, disrupt learning and sharing, hence by definition constitute "bad behavior". If it exists, the hyperwar you allude to will harm communities more than all LLMs combined could do.
It's hell for my ADHD, personally. It's an infinite rabbit hole generator and distraction machine. I have to use browser extensions to filter out stuff like Stack Exchange suggestions for interesting topics, too. I have had to block Wikipedia in the past to avoid rabbit holes there
I'm better now than I used to be but I am skeptical of people who claim to both be good at multi-tasking and also have ADHD. My experience with ADHD is that multi -tasking is not a strength, it's a sign of distraction
Interesting point of view from one who's been there. Intuitively the comment makes a lot of sense.
In a way human multitasking resembles how single-threaded computer programs work. That is, we focus on one task at a time but tasks can be interleaved to give an illusion of doing several tasks at the same time. Managing several tasks requires remembering the next step to do when leaving one task to attend to another.
That suggests ADHD people lose track of where they left off when performing several tasks. Distraction plays a role, but I think problematic working memory is the major issue. Among ADHD researchers there's a saying, "people with ADHD know what to do but don't do what they know." ADHD task performance may improve with proper treatment.
Don't know the tests you refer to, but it's recognized that many adults have ADHD symptoms not quite meeting DSM-5 criteria for ADHD. It's called "subsyndromal" ADHD which causes as much disability and responds to treatment just as well as "full" ADHD cases. IOW it's absurd to regard someone with 6 symptoms as belonging in a different category vs. a person having "only" 5 symptoms. Anyway, ADHD is a condition that usually responds to treatment, no reason not to check into it.
Not quite. At least not for me. My problem is hyperfocus. If I switch tasks I might go down a rabbit hole and forget to change back. It is similar to being distracted, except the distraction can still be legitimate work stuff. My focus is like a freight train, it's hard to change tracks
Which can seem like an attention problem when you're trying to change me from focused code mode to "jump on a call" mode
For many with ADHD starting tasks is hard and resuming a task can be just as hard. Constant experience of "starting from scratch" is burdensome, and contributes to inertia and inefficiency. More than not, a tough problem to solve.
I've long thought disability associated with ADHD is generally underappreciated despite decades of study proving the point.
Self-observation isn't easy. I always considered it a sign of growth when people shared what they've seen.
Agents let me complete things in parallel all the time.
They also let me build tools that manage all the attention-grabbing things in my life. Something I've been meaning to do "tomorrow" for a good decade.
I've already built custom notification tools for all the "I'll just quickly check hn/lobste.rs/tildes/whatever" so that they'll tell me if there's something actionable, closing down the rabbit hole for me. My email is pre-filtered by an agent that pings me if there's something urgent. My IRC client is custom-built for the specific way I use it etc etc.
Care to share it?
I still do start from bottom up to refactor everything into workspace members and this way, parallelism is way easier
> LLMs reward seeing forest instead of trees.
Not just forest. LLMs reward seeing structures and designs, and it still requires a lot of creativity to design it well. I have to do a lot of architect works for that, like package layout, testing strategies (BDD vs TDD vs E2E), setting up access to platforms and digging out what strategies to apply...etc.
> People focused on the trees will however lag behind as implementation details matter less and less.
Trees like demonstrations and example code are even more important. This is because those are literally post-training materials for the LLMs
> Specialists will be fed to the model weights
I don't think so. New labor laws are certainly going to be introduced by the politicans to tackle this.
> generalists will inherit the world.
Now the problem is how far do you want to stretch the systemic thinking, and you also get burned out quicker.
But I don't want to use AI to code, in large part because I iterate on ideas by working directly with code. Attempting to program through an LLM intermediary becomes like attempting to eat using soft silicone chopsticks.
I use an LLM to make custom software for myself not because I enjoy coding but because I want software that I can't afford to hire a human to make for me. Buying a robot to do it (current agentic coding LLMs) is the only way it gets done at all.
These two things are not the same, and should not be viewed in the same light.
All that being said, I would 100% buy a weeding robot. Weeding sucks.
You enjoy the act of gardening, so you do not automate it away.
You enjoy the clean home, not the act of cleaning, so you may be interested in automating it away.
It seems you enjoy designing or using software, as opposed to programming/building software. So you automate the programming/building away.
Unless your hobby is backyard robotic gardening.
Which is my way of saying that people have different reasons for enjoying a hobby.
Like most hobby debates, this one comes down to "Let people enjoy things"
It depends what you value. There's "zoning out going through the motions" for mindfulness and then there's "building stuff!" for interest, learning and fun.
And you can have any combination of the two. Like maybe doing the same planting routine but with different details for a different plant or experimenting if a new layout works better.
I don't care to do the labour of gardening. But if I had time, I'd spend it bikeshedding optimisations. IE what about grow lights? Is it worth having a greenhouse in my climate? etc etc. And all the little details about building stuff.
Aside: I too want a robot. One for lawn mowing (they exist but expensive) and one for spraying the little lawn weeds that pop up.
...cheaper how? My partner and I grow most of our veggies and, based on our calculations (including fixed costs that have gone into the garden, as well as e.g. water, fertilizer, etc.) we save a non-negligible amount of money every month.
On the other end of the spectrum, if you grow in fertile native soil from seed your costs can be close to zero
The people like me that sort of just stumbled into this career as a result of spending the evenings of our youth trying to get the computer to do interesting things don't seem to have as much appreciation now that the LLMs are taking over the fun part.
Those people are in for the biggest shock and largest disappointment: when a bright teenager can replicate, with an LLM, what they produced with an LLM the pay is going to fall off a cliff.
At least those who really are into development to the point of writing their own OS, Language, etc can still enjoy it as a hobby.
The value of an engineer is not what task they work on, but what problems they can solve. To this teen, the code is a black box, the LLM has most of the value in their pairing, and another random teen will replace easily them.
LLMs were trained on the work of engineers, not prompting teens. The profession will continue to evolve, and the LLMs will improve along, thanks to professional, manual code still being written, not to vibe-coders.
Computers were on a trajectory of becoming more consumption oriented, and this has shifted it strongly back towards creation. Normal people can make their own custom software again. This is awesome.
LLMs are amazing tools for learning new skills and technology. I’ve recently moved into an ML adjacent role, am learning tons that I never knew before, and I’m delivering working systems more quickly.
One thing that’s been an eye-opener is how many details I miss in the code I write. LLMs can almost always suggest improvements, and usually, it’s quite obvious that they’re right. But this is making me a better developer, even though I already have decades of experience.
LLMs don’t force you to vibe code everything. You can use them as precisely or as vibe-ishly as you want. They can be a skill amplifier rather than a skill replacer, if you use them as such.
And I love using LLMs. They take care of all the boring boilerplate, letting me focus on the parts I actually enjoy.
I enjoy optimizing code to the point of obsession, but I can't find economic (daily-job) justification to spend time on this. Lately I've had several extremely productive and enjoyable sessions that go like this: - I run Claude on my desktop PC, explain the problem, and let it explore the code around the problem and build a test harness so it can run experiments - I ask it to run experiments and try things; at that point I can leave my PC and continue over my phone in brief stolen moments here and there, over the course of many hours - it comes back with results; I ask it to try new things based on those results - after multiple rounds of this, I have explored a vast search space I could have never had time to do myself - I ask it for an implementation of the most promising path; this is usually something simpl-ish (on the order of 50-100 LOC, not huge new systems) - I return to the PC and do something between polish the implementation and redo it fully manually - partly because I enjoy it
This is something I can see myself do for fun in areas I care about, not for money and reasonable business objectives for my day job.
So while LLMs solve the technical implementation side, there's still upside since now we get to materialize the dang thing we were setting out to build in the first place.
Though there's a huge sense of loss since so much of our skills and identity and time and value were devoted to the engineering side.
Similarly I've made lots of software projects. Over the last 15+ years I have over 250 github repos, the majority of them no one but me will be interested in but I had fun making stuff. LLMs let me make stuff faster just like the power tools. I'm still enjoying making stuff. I still direct, I still decide what to make, I still decide features, iterate on UX, etc, but at several X the speed of before. Loving it.
I also woodwork and I remember this discussion there between hand tools, power tools, and CNCs. It's all the same hobby just different entry points and doing it the least automated way doesn't make your work more or less than anyone else's.
I LOLd very hard at that one, thanks. Very relatable.
A hobby of mine is also woodworking. I can make jigs, I can buy jigs. I can use hand tools, I can use power tools. I can use screws I can use joints. I can even buy made furniture and just assemble it. Though the latter is more of interior designing. But the point is it is a spectrum and everyone has their own niche. SDLC are not the same and there is different value to be derived. But the process of woodworking makes me handy. The experience allows me to elegantly and cost efficiently fix broken things. It enables me to do interesting things in interesting ways and there is more of a community around that. If I automated away all the woodworking and just bought the furniture... Well there isn't much of a community around that except flexing who has more cash. Idk, I'm trying to have empathy for both those who are for and against it.
Boy isn't that the truth haha, I feel like my previous phase of dotfile ricing has become "LLM ricing."
Not complaining though, it is genuinely fun!
It's an age-old debate in every hobby.
Some people are in it for the process. Others are in it for the end result, which is what they want to use or play with.
In woodworking there are some circles who will sneer at you for using certain power tools instead of hand tools. I do think it's more impressive when someone makes something entirely with hand tools. I don't have all the time in the world to work on a project, so I'm going to use the power tools when I can.
Some people care a lot about impressing others with how they made a thing. Some times that's appropriate, like if there's a competition for hand-made or human-written something. Other times, nobody cares. They're getting together to enjoy the end result, not the artisanal process used to make it.
Indeed, and this is the problem: unlike woodworking, where my power-assisted creation is independent of, or complements, your handcraft, this engine is directly competing with other engines. Twiss is being disingenuous when he says he has no interest in submitting it to competitions; it plays on a rated account on Lichess, for example.
In fact handicraft people were out competed so hard many people forget that used to be a respectable career.
I will say that there are a lot of parts of programming I enjoy, but I used to spend an inordinate amount of time chasing down obscure errors or learning arcane systems just to get to the parts I personally enjoy: the feedback loop of making a thing, seeing the result, and improving it.
There is a reason stack overflow is dead. LLMs are a strictly better product.
It is an example of something that has hobby-like characteristics.
What is the "end result"? You refer to cleaning here, but many people use AI spam slop to bombard people with garbage text. That is not "cleaning up", that is literally wasting the time of real people here. And that's just one example of many more that can be given of AI slop not being so great.
Yes if your end result is technical debt and endless bullshit. (Some enterprise environments do be like that.)
disliking LLMs is just an opinion. Refusing to engage with an argument and instead defaulting to downvotes when you can't supply a reasonable argument or proof is just ai/corporate-fanaticism and self-delusion enhanced by LLM-dependence.
If I understand you correctly, you're arguing that anyone who disagrees with you is:
1. An AI/corporate fascist. 2. Self-deluded. 3. Dependent on LLMs.
Could you now provide what you yourself called a "reasonable argument or proof" that these claims are actually true?