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by boredemployee 628 days ago
Well, I must admit, LLMs made me lose the joy of learning programming and made me realize I like to solve problems.

There was a time I really liked to go through books, documentation, learn and run the codes etc. but these days are gone for me. I prefer to enjoy free time and go to the gym now

3 comments

I'm the same, and I think it's a product of getting older and being more and more acutely aware of the passage of time and not wanting to spend time on bullshit things. Nothing to do with LLMs. I still like solving problems in code but I no longer get any joy from learning yet another new language or framework to do the same things we've been doing for the past 30 years, but with a different accent.
It is kind of opposite to me. I do a lot more side projects now, because I enjoy building, and I enjoy using LLMs as this multiplying tool so I build more with the same amount of time. I think integrating LLM with your workflow is also problem solving and an exciting novel way to problem solve at this. It gets my imagination really running and it is awesome to be able to exchange back and forth to overall see things from more perspectives since LLM can give me more different and varied point of views than I alone could have come up with.
Same here; I am building so much more and faster than ever in my life and it is great. When I was a kid in the early 80s learning about AI, like everyone who mentored me, I thought it would be replacing programmers by 2000; that might still happen but for now the productivity is a blast.
LLMs really help me with the blank page problem. Just getting something, even partially working, to built upon can be a huge win.
I am in your camp. LLMs have made everything better for me, both learning and producing.
Same for me. Many times I would have an idea, but I would think ahead of all the mundane and tedious things I would need to complete to implement it and not even get started. Now I work with the LLM to do those more tedious and mechanical parts and frankly the LLM is generating pretty similar code to what I would have written anyway and if not I just rewrite it. A few times I've even been pleasantly surprised when the LLM took an approach I wouldn't have considered and I actually liked it better.
This sentiment, I observe it everywhere. My coworkers and the people I interact with in engineering communities. A process of hollowing out and loss of motivation, a loss of meaning and purpose, as people delegate more and more of their thinking to the LLM.

Some may ruminate and pontificate and lament the loss of engineering dignity, maybe even the loss of human dignity.

But some will realize this is an inevitable result of human nature. They accept that the minds of their fellow men will atrophy through disuse, that people will rapidly become dependent and cognitively impaired. A fruitful stance is to make an effort to profit from this downfall, instead of complaining impotently. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41733311

There's also an aspect of tragic comedy. You can tell that people are dazzled by the output of the LLM, accepting its correctness because it talks so smart. They have lost the ability to evaluate its correctness, or will never develop said ability.

Here is an example from yesterday. This is totally nonsensical and incorrect yet the commenter pasted it into the thread to demonstrate the LLM's understanding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41747089

Grab your popcorn and enjoy the show. "Nothing stops this train."

The wrong July 16th answer is hilarious! Half of the examples that are posted here as proof of the brilliance of LLMs are trivially wrong.
No, they posted it to the thread to illustrate that the problem was in the training set. Which it obviously was.

I don't know where your interpretation came from. Perhaps you're an LLM and you hallucinated it? :)

It's called getting older. You guys are so dramatic about the llm stuff lol
So dramatic... There are so many people who are so psyched on what LLMs have allowed them to achieve, and so many beginners that can't believe they've suddenly got an app, and so many veterans who feel disenchanted, and so on and so forth. I'm quite tired of everyone generalizing LLM reactions based on their own experience!
No, it is called having one's open source output stolen by billionaires who then pay enough apologists, directly or indirectly, to justify the heist.
No one stole anything from you. Other than maybe your self esteem.
Large language models are used to aggregate and interpolate intellectual property.

This is performed with no acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, with no attribution or citation.

In effect, the intellectual property used to train such models becomes anonymous common property.

The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) that often motivate open source work are undermined.

Anyone who contradicts a (probably paid) apologist must be either old or lacking in self esteem. Well done, your masters will be happy.
lol you think I'm paid to argue with VC bros on Hackernews?

"Anyone who contradicts my opinion is paid off"

I do it for the love of the game.

Self esteem? I mean plagiarism is a compliment. It's also a licence violation and a shame rich capitalists do it to screw everyone else as usual.
How are rich people screwing you with AI? Which people?