[colbyn]

Today it's LLMs/ChatBots, when I was younger it was StackOverflow. Interestingly, when I was just starting out I remember being told to avoid copying & pasting snippets from SO in favor of learning to solve problems on my own, or at the very least, slow down and manually type out the snippets (which actually helped). I used to be against LLMs/ChatBots (as someone who likes to write) but now I've gone all in, it's just such a great productivity booster for very common grunt work that doesn't require too much project specific context... At the same time, while I do sometimes wonder if this will cause my problem solving skills to stagnate, I'm far more concerned about the broader ecosystem. LLMs perform best when the solution domain is well represented in their training dataset and with hard cutoffs and whatnot, I do wonder if this will cause tools / frameworks / libraries to stagnate because people will favor older tools over newer tools for better ease of use. Great for established authors, not so great for new ideas, something that too few people are talking about.