| It’s a big tent and anyone is welcome in. I learned to code on my own thanks to the efforts of people to write manuals, articles, text files on BBSs and NNTP. That’s just one way. But try the other shoe on and walk a mile. You like writing code and solving problems yourself. Everyone in the world is telling you you’re irrelevant and should start using the machine or get left behind. The future is here and you’re not a part of it unless you give up and join us. Constantly. It was hard before LLMs to convince software developers, let alone managers and product people and everyone else, to take quality seriously. Now it’s orders of magnitude harder. Because anything you say is met with someone who doesn’t care and thinks it’s all irrelevant. The machine will get better. It will solve all of these problems. Give up. Fortunately that hasn’t deterred craftspeople in other trades who made knives, custom cabinetry, boats, houses and the like. Sure automation and progress has made a lot of knives available. Maybe more than we need. And most of them are disposable crap. But there are still knife makers. All this talk of being reasonable is hard to take seriously when neither side will consider the other. It’s also possible that even after considering all of the technical features and capabilities that LLMs bring to software development that some folks don’t find the cost of using them to be worth it. So they can say, “Sure, I will use such tools when and if I deem it appropriate.” Which may be never. But we’re in a world right now where you can be coerced into feeling like there’s no choice but to accept those trade offs and just use the LLM. I think it’s interesting and good that there exist places for people who share similar goals. There are few places for people who want to just do programming to chill out and not be surrounded by LLM generated code. Also the scraping situation is totally getting out of hand. Having to keep up services is not easy or fun work. It’s just toil created at the expense of many for the benefit of few. |