There are, broadly speaking, two categories of problems with LLM generated code (well, everything, but code here specifically). One is purely technical, does it bring anything to the process, does it broadly speaking saves you time or effort. And the second is everything else: environmental impact, the bubble of it all, the consolidation of power to all the worst people, erosion of skills, death of education, inflation of prices of consumer electronics, psychological impact, and so so so much more, all lumped together as non-technical downsides.
A bunch of llm-proponents, and here we sadly have to include even Linus, are only engaged with the first category of problems, throwing the whole second category aside as “irrelevant”. And a lot of those people are smart enough so I don’t believe they don’t see this.
If there was only the problem of the tool being kinda shitty but useful for some people, I wouldn’t be so against it. I still don’t believe they actually benefit from it, but if they think they do, I’m not going to argue with them about it.
But it’s fundamentally not true. You can’t ignore the second category in your evaluation. To quote Linus himself,
But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing “La La
La, I can’t hear you” at the top of your voice like some people seem
to do
about the fact that even one of the downsides from the second category makes the whole “but I, a person with 40 years of experience, can use llm in such a way that it sometimes produces some benefit” not worth it. No benefit of it is worth the fact that the new generation of junior developers don’t know how to write code on a fundamental level, while elon mask owns all of humanity’s personal data and can do whatever he wants with it. Even if those benefits were kinda big, it wouldn’t worth it, but they aren’t.
There are, broadly speaking, two categories of problems with LLM generated code (well, everything, but code here specifically). One is purely technical, does it bring anything to the process, does it broadly speaking saves you time or effort. And the second is everything else: environmental impact, the bubble of it all, the consolidation of power to all the worst people, erosion of skills, death of education, inflation of prices of consumer electronics, psychological impact, and so so so much more, all lumped together as non-technical downsides.
A bunch of llm-proponents, and here we sadly have to include even Linus, are only engaged with the first category of problems, throwing the whole second category aside as “irrelevant”. And a lot of those people are smart enough so I don’t believe they don’t see this.
If there was only the problem of the tool being kinda shitty but useful for some people, I wouldn’t be so against it. I still don’t believe they actually benefit from it, but if they think they do, I’m not going to argue with them about it.
But it’s fundamentally not true. You can’t ignore the second category in your evaluation. To quote Linus himself,
about the fact that even one of the downsides from the second category makes the whole “but I, a person with 40 years of experience, can use llm in such a way that it sometimes produces some benefit” not worth it. No benefit of it is worth the fact that the new generation of junior developers don’t know how to write code on a fundamental level, while elon mask owns all of humanity’s personal data and can do whatever he wants with it. Even if those benefits were kinda big, it wouldn’t worth it, but they aren’t.