| There's a lot that's worth thinking about and discussing on this topic, but it's too loaded with emotional stuff for many people to hope for a productive discussion. I'm a programming languages nerd. I was paid to program in over 20 different languages over my 25 year career. I read up on many more languages along the way, and I wrote pet projects in a few of those. I've written a couple assemblers, compilers, and interpreters for my own languages. I think literally everyone should be taught to program in elementary school. It's arguably one of the best ways to teach logical thought and careful organization of ideas. I like Alan Perlis's quote: You think you know when you can learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program. With all of that out of the way, I think there are interesting questions to ask going forward: If you were starting a business for a great software idea, with your own savings on the line, would you hire 10 AI hostile programmers to implement the idea or 2 AI friendly people and get them some subscriptions to the top models? Remember: if it doesn't come together, it's YOUR money on the line. What are the best programming languages for LLMs to program with? Could someone design a better language that fits their strengths and weaknesses? I think the most popular human languages have way too much affordance for concerns that don't apply to models. I think letting LLMs program in human friendly languages makes the results more difficult for humans to inspect. There's a slight chicken and egg problem based on the training sets used by large models, but this can be addressed with LoRA tuning and similar techniques for open weight models. How can we make LLMs scale better so that people who don't like to program can get better "vibe coding" results? Tools like Excel are huge force multipliers for so many people who aren't interested in writing traditional code. I think it should be possible for non-programmers to solve their own problems and trust the results without becoming programmers. Anyways, I've got my own partially formed answers to those questions, but I'd like to hear what other people who aren't still suffering stages of LLM programming grief have to say and ask. |
Are you saying that 10 programmers cost as much as 2 random people and some LLM subscriptions? Sign me up for the 10 programmers, then. I wouldn’t even need most of them, I’ve done a lot with teams of two and three, and more may just get in the way. I couldn’t care less how “AI friendly” the other people are; if they’re not programmers, using LLMs to produce a program is going to lead to bad results. Why would I even hire them? Might as well do the prompting myself if the results are that good in your fantasy scenario.
> Remember: if it doesn't come together, it's YOUR money on the line.
So, if it doesn’t come together, I either empowered 10 people to feed their families, gave them opportunities to hone their skills, and possibly developed new friendships and contacts for future endeavours (where maybe next time they’ll even hire me); or I helped just 2 people with no return and lined the pockets of rich people who are actively exploiting everyone else and destroying the environment and social trust for personal profit.
Your scenario is truly bizarre. Is it just an obvious ploy to detect those who lack in empathy and only think of personal profit?