Greentext

Probably promoted to middle management instead

I like the sentiment of the article; however this quote really rubs me the wrong way:

I’m not suggesting we abandon AI tools—that ship has sailed.

Why would that ship have sailed? No one is forcing you to use an LLM. If, as the article supposes, using an LLM is detrimental, and it's possible to start having days where you don't use an LLM, then what's stopping you from increasing the frequency of those days until you're not using an LLM at all?

I personally don't interact with any LLMs, neither at work or at home, and I don't have any issue getting work done. Yeah there was a decently long ramp-up period — maybe about 6 months — when I started on ny current project at work where it was more learning than doing; but now I feel like I know the codebase well enough to approach any problem I come up against. I've even debugged USB driver stuff, and, while it took a lot of research and reading USB specs, I was able to figure it out without any input from an LLM.

Maybe it's just because I've never bought into the hype; I just don't see how people have such a high respect for LLMs. I'm of the opinion that using an LLM has potential only as a truly last resort — and even then will likely not be useful.

Not even. Every time someone lets AI run wild on a problem, they're trading all trust I ever had in them for complete garbage that they're not even personally invested enough in to defend it when I criticize their absolute shit code. Don't submit it for review if you haven't reviewed it yourself, Darren.

Nahhh, I never would have solved that problem myself, I'd have just googled the shit out of it til I found someone else that had solved it themselves

This guy's solution to becoming crappier over time is "I'll drink every day, but abstain one day a week".

I'm not convinced that "that ship has sailed" as he puts it.

Hey that sounds exactly like what the last company I worked at did for every single project 🙃

Capitalism is inherently short-sighted.

You'd think that, but I believe you are underestimating people's ability to mindlessly memorize stuff without learning it.

It's super easy to learn how algorithms and what not work without knowing the syntax of a language. I can tell you how a binary search tree works, but I have no clue how to code it in Java because I've never used Java.

I'm a full stack polyglot and tbh I couldn't program in some languages without reference docs / LLM even though I ship production code in those language all the time. Memorizing all of the function and method names and all of the syntax/design pattern stuff is pretty hard especially when it's not really needed in contemporary dev.

Exactly my thought

A lot of kids fresh out of highschool are pressured into going to college right away. Its the societal norm for some fucking reason.

Give these kids a break and let them go when they're really ready. Personally I sat around for a year and a half before I felt like "fuck, this is boring lets go learn something now". If i had gone to college straight from highschool I would've flunked out and just wasted all that money for nothing.

My Java classes at uni:

Here's a piece of code that does nothing. Make it do nothing, but in compliance with this design pattern.

When I say it did nothing, I mean it had literally empty function bodies.

To get hired.

To get a job so you don't starve

Because college is awesome and many employers use a degree as a simple filter any way

He probably couldn't explain it well if he didn't know how to code at all imo

I'm honestly impressed he went the entire time memorizing the code enough to be able to explain it, and picked up nada.

Or he asked the LLM to summarise it and memorised that.

My first programming course (in Java) had a pen and paper exam. Minus points if you missed a bracket. :/

If there's no code completion, I can tell you even people who's been doing coding as a job for years aren't going to write it correctly from memory. Because we're not being paid to memorize this shit, we're being paid to solve problems optimally.