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It is not the same imho; the code copied from SO, they had to change a bit; even if there was no understanding in the beginning, after changing and running and changing and running in a loop until it works, you learn something (often about how variables work). This is more like when I was typing in BASIC source from magazines in the early 80s and changing things to see if I could cheat in a game or make the gameplay different etc. The difference is that even if it doesn't work one-shot with an llm, the loop doesn't have you in it; sure sometimes you have to hammer the Yes button (but you can switch that off); it will be auto for all very soon, if you don't make a real conscious effort, you are not going to learn anything from it. Maybe just you wondering why they are paying you for clicking Yes. Because of where the HN community works and hires, things are a bit different; in the real world, senior programmers (people who are hired in that role and make money for >=decade, not whatever your feeling what it should be is) are not very different either. Very many don't know what they are doing either, just they deliver by trial and error and got their years and stripes in, still barely understanding what they are doing. This now has become easier with llms for them too, but it's the reason why I, vs other people on hn, am bearish on programmer jobs; by far most outside the hn bubble are and always were terrible and can be readily replaced by llms now and will be soon. The ones that do understand what they are doing and can architect, write and read complex software won't be replaced by the current or next gen, but when we read that companies are going to lay off programmers in favour of llms, they mean the people I have to work with daily (we go into large companies and do emergency repairs; there was an article yesterday somewhere saying that all companies have outages all the time; sometimes we get called in for those) who have massive teams of people who cannot write anything sensible; it is useful for the problem, but reading the code or looking how it's done makes you cry; clearly there was no real understanding to begin with. Most commonly, and this wasn't all that common when we started out, an (or rather 1000s now) external library was used, the way it was supposed to be used wasn't completely/fully understood and so a bunch of brittle code has been produced to make it work in the way the author believed it should work, breaking in a myriad of edge cases that are discovered (by outage often) years/decades later. I am thinking that maybe llms are better at these cases; sure they 'understand' about the same nothing, but at least, once it works, they can clean up the code without effort so it might not be that crust of misunderstood pain plastered on top to hold things together. |
Yup. I had to deal with that last year when some senior Microsoft devs tried to shove serverless Azure stuff into something that was supposed to be for a Seattle community group full of non-technical people. The group lead was totally oblivious to how serverless on-demand pricing worked and wanted a fixed monthly cost. That whole project ended up getting scrapped and replaced with an Excel spreadsheet.