[righthand]

And so you would accept “hey I spun up a react-create-element project, but instead of React I asked an LLM to copy the parts I needed for react so we have another dependency to maintain instead of tree shaking with webpack” as a useful work?

[buddhistdude]

not necessarily, but it's not less creative and inventive than what I believe most programmers are doing most of the time. there are relatively few people who invent new patterns (and they actually might be overrepresented on this website). the rest learns and applies those patterns.

[righthand]

Right that is well understood, but having an LLM compile together functions under the guise of custom built library is hardly a software engineer applying established patterns.

[jeswin]

It is exactly the same as applying established patterns - patterns are what the LLMs have trained on.

It seems you haven't really used LLMs for coding. They're super useful and improving every month - you don't have to take my word for it.

And btw - codespin (https://github.com/codespin-ai/codespin) along with the VSCode plugin is what I use for AI-assisted coding many times. That was also generated via an LLM. I wrote it last year, and at that point there weren't many projects it could copy from.

[righthand]

I don’t need to use an LLM for coding because my projects where I would need an LLM don’t include things already existing that would be a waste of time no matter how efficiently I could do it.

Furthermore it is an application of principles but the application was done a long time ago by someone else, not the LLM and not you. As you claimed you did none of the work, only went in and tweak these applied principles.

I’ll tell you what slows me down and why I don’t need an LLM. I had a task to migrate some legacy code from one platform to another, I made the PRs, added some tests, and prepared the deploy files as instructed in the READMEs of the platform I was migrating to. This took me 3-4 days. It then took 26 days to get the code deployed because 5 people are gate keepers of Helm charts and AWS policies.

Software development isn’t slow because I had to read docs and understand what I’m building, it is slow because we’ve enabled AWS to create red tape and gatekeepers. Your LLM doesn’t speed up that process.

> They're super useful and improving every month - you don't have to take my word for it.

And each month that goes by that you continue to invest, your value decreases and you will be out of a job. As you have demonstrated, you don’t need to know how to build a UI library or even that your UI library you “generated” is just a reskin of something else. If it’s so simple and amazing that you don’t need to know anything, why would I keep you around?

Here’s a fun anecdote, sometimes I pair with my manager when working through something pretty causally. I need to rubber duck an idea or am stuck on finding the documentation for a construct. My manager will often take my problem and chat with an LLM for a few minutes. Every time I end up finding the answer before he finishes his chat. Most of the time his solution is often wrong because by nature LLMs are scrambling the possible results to make it look like a unique solution.

Congrats on impressing yourself that LLM can be a slightly accurate code generator. How does paying a company to do something TabNine was doing years ago make me money? What will you do with all your free time generate more useless dependencies?

[jeswin]

If you think TabNine was doing years ago what LLMs are doing today, then I can't convince you.

We'll talk in a year or so.

[righthand]

No we won’t, we’ll all be laid off and some young devs will be hired 1/3 the cost to replace your ui library with something else spit out of an llm which specifically tuned to cobble together js apps.