[fellowniusmonk]

I really don't understand people who are down on LLM.

In terms of code output. I have gone from the productivity of being a Sr. Engineer to a team with .8 of a Sr. Engineer, 5 Jr. Engineers and One dude solely dedicated to reading/creating documentation.

Unlike a lot of my fellow engineers who are also from traditional CS backgrounds and haven't worked in revenue restricted startup environments, I also have been VERY into interpreted languages like ruby in the past.

Now compiled languages are even better, I think from a velocity perspective compiled languages are now incredibly on par for prototyping velocity and have had their last weakness removed.

It's both exciting and scary, I can't believe how people are still sleep walking in this environment and don't realize we are in a different world. Once again the human inability to "gut reason" about exponentials is going to screw us all over.

One terribly overlooked thing I've noticed that I think explains the differing takes. Foundation of my position here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60661-8

Within the population that writes code there are a small number of successful people who approach the topic in a ~purely mathematical approach, and a small number of successful people that approach writing code in a ~purely linguistic approach. Most people fall somewhere in the middle.

Those who are on the MOST extreme end of the mathematic side and are linguistically bereft HATE LLM's and effectively cannot use them.

My guess is that HN population will tend to show stronger reactions against LLM's because it was heavily seeded with functional programmers which I think has a concentration of the successful extremely math focused. I worked for several years in a purely functional shop and that was my observation: Elixir, Haskell, Ramda.

Just my speculation.

[whyowhy3484939]

There is this interesting thing called the Paradox of Automation where increasing automation increases the importance of human intervention. We are trying this out on a societal level. It will be.. interesting, to say the least.

Also, congratulations on becoming a team. I sure hope you have the mental bandwidth to check all that output carefully. If so, doubly congrats, because you might be the smartest human that ever lived.

[fellowniusmonk]

I appreciate you're incredulity and snark! Dismissing without engagement is a fun ability to exercise. I look forward to talking past each other going forward :-)

HackerNews typically doesn't appreciate and will ban accounts for that type of engagement as it is just personal and not a factual wrestling with the point of discussion, I see you are new here and I would encourage you to not continue to engage in the patterns you show.

At core, I think perhaps we have a different interpretation of what 20% of a Sr. Engineer can accomplish and what Jr. Devs are capable of accomplishing.

To be fair to your point, I think one of the enablers is that I actually enjoy working longer hours now so my net time engaging with code has gone up as well.

But I'm from the old school and I've always preferred time in code vs having outside hobbies, that's been true since the 90s.

I find code reviews relaxing and enjoyable and not particularly mentally taxing for 90% of what a decent jr. dev writes. I find it a nice little break from working on problems that can actually be classified as "hard".

Coincidentally, I've worked in human in the loop automation for quite a long time, making Sr. individuals more efficient with their time and removing busy work has been a big focus.

There is a lot in that space to consider from a human factors perspective, the intersection of creation vs editing is a big one, decomposing problems for sure, each individual seems to have different capabilities and natural bents in that regard. I've long been a thought dump and edit person and that's part of what I attribute my high personal productivity to.

[whyowhy3484939]

Ah, I met my match it seems.

I confess I might be showing signs of unlawful thought patterns. I will correct that, fellowniusmonk. Thanks for pointing that out.

I am in the "code is not an asset, it's a liability"-camp and our recently acquired ability to swiftly defecate metric tons of it is not something I am particularly thrilled about. In fact, I find "senior" engineers using LoC as a productivity metric highly suspect - at best. I thought we passed that phase a decade or two ago. Not saying you are one, but in the spirit of talking past each other I thought it prudent to put up a good straw man.

All in all to be completely honest I find it hard to parse your original point so I concur I wasn't engaging properly. To be fair you opened with "in terms of code output" so that's what triggered me I guess.

[yoyohello13]

> Those who are on the MOST extreme end of the mathematic side and are linguistically bereft HATE LLM's and effectively cannot use them.

This is an interesting observation. It at least aligns with my experience. I wouldn't say I'm "linguistically bereft" lol, but I do lean more toward the "functional programming is beautiful" side. I even have a degree in math. I'm not totally down on LLM coding, but I do fall more on unfavorable feelings side. I mostly just hate the idea of having a bunch of code I don't fully understand, but also am responsible for.

I do use them, and find them helpful. But the idea of fully giving control of my codebase to LLM agents, like some people are suggesting, repels me.

[fellowniusmonk]

Yeah, I certainly don't mean to imply that's the only reason. There are MANY reasons to hate LLMs and people all up and down the spectrum hate them for any number of reasons. I definitely think utility is still language specific as well (LLMs are just terrible with some languages), project specific, etc.

I think currently there are prompts and approaches that help ensure functions stay small and easy to reason about but it's very context dependent. Certainly any language or framework that has large amount of boilerplate will be less painful to work with if you hate boilerplate, I think that could arguably be increasing enshitification though in a sense. The people who say tons of code is being generated and it will all come crashing down in an unmaintainable mess... I do kinda agree.

I'm glad I am not writing code in medical/flight control systems or something like that, I think LLMs can be used in that context but idk if they would save or increase time?

Certain types of tasks require greater precision. Like in working with wood, framing a house is fine but building a dovetailed cabinet drawer is not on the table if that makes sense?

My impression is that at this point work in high precision environments is still in the human domain and LLMs are not. Multi-agent approaches maybe, treating humans like the final agent in multi-agent approaches, maybe, idk, I'm not working on any life or death libraries or projects ATM but I do feel good about test coverage so maybe that's good enough in a lot of cases.

People who say non-devs can dev with ai or cursor, I think at this point that's just a way of getting non-technical people to burn tokens and give them more money, but idk if that will be true in six months you know?