| > The thought I keep having as I read these recurring conversations on HN is “what the fuck happened to proud nerds?” A big group here seems obsessed with doing as little as possible for as much money as possible Devs have always considered ourselves lazy. The point of programming is to do as little actual work as possible ;) Any self-respecting sysop has a couple hundred scripts so that they don't have to actually type anything :) I dunno. I totally see the point that losing the ability to read and write long-form text is a loss to civilisation. But I also see civilisation as a constantly changing thing, and trying to freeze or stop that change is futile and counter-productive. If the price of moving to the next stage (whatever that is) is losing long-form text, then OK, let's do that, painful as it is. I still read books. I think I'm in a minority because most of the people I talk to about books seem to listen to them rather than read them. I find this somewhat ironic - humans had a rich, vibrant, oral storytelling ability and culture that was completely destroyed by the printing press. We used to be able to remember huge numbers of stories, and there were professional storytellers. And then we learned to read and write, and that destroyed our ability to remember that much. We have books to remember them for us. Likewise it used to be common for families to play music and sing together of an evening, before TV or Radio or recorded music. It's still not uncommon that people play a musical instrument, but it's not as common as it was, and it's a rare family that plays or sings together. Instead we have access to all the music we ever need. I don't know if that's better, but the music certainly is; I can't play anything for shit. |
Sure, that's why this [0] XKCD was made - getting pulled off on a geeky sidequest, automating something that has (almost) no business being automated, and spending far longer configuring, debugging, and refining your "time saving" scripts than actually doing the damn task are what I expect a dev to get lost in.
Which, sure, is a form of laziness, but it has a different vibe than getting an LLM to do everything for you IMO.
As an aside, a common refrain is that the best computer people are innately curious; they wanted to see how the computer responded if they broke or changed something. LLMs make putting up with the (relatively) long slog to find out less likely to happen; in a way, I'd argue they destroy curiousity itself: a horrifying proposition for anyone that looks to the future of computing, or even humanity in general.
[0] https://m.xkcd.com/1319/