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by gwynforthewyn 107 days ago
Honestly, the post itself reads very generated, very rage bate. I have so much more faith in us and our hobby/industry than this blog post.

There are reports of industries trying to use these tools to generate as much as possible, sure. There are also people generating bad art and unpleasant prose and using llms to generate nonsense they don’t pay attention to.

I don’t see why that implies that you or I lost interest in tinkering with toys we build. If I want to spend 4 weeks understanding oauth a little better by implementing a client, I still can and I still do.

Automating our builds absolutely didn’t create a cathedral of complexity while nobody noticed. It did mean I can open an Free Software project, read the build file and understand how to build the thing. That’s the opposite of generating complexity.

I worry about our future generations as much as the next person, but this low effort pabulum doesn’t represent the thoughtful industry and hobby that I love.

2 comments

I don't think the hobbyist interest will go away, but I can see what's happening affecting business that use software.

For most businesses, software is just a means to an end, they don't really care how high quality and thoughtful the systems they use are (e.g. look at any piece of "enterprise" software)

What LLMs have done is made much much easier for orgs to launch new features and services both internally and externally, without necessarily understanding the complexity.

For me, that's what this post tapped into. Many orgs already have more complexity than they can reasonably handle. Massively accelerating development, is not going to make that problem better :)

>Honestly, the post itself reads very generated, very rage bate. I have so much more faith in us and our hobby/industry than this blog post.

Don't get me wrong. I think the future is very bright for software. I have friends who are scientist and biomedical professionals and I am excited to see what they are able to do with the powers of software where they don't need to care about syntax and can only lead with their intentions.

The rage bait part is mainly my frustrations manifesting. As an SRE my annoyances came off a little bit when it comes to how fast developers are shipping vs how fast our rails can maintain things.