I beg you people to just once honestly put the supposed resource use of AI into any kind of perspective. What do you think, how many prompts worth of AI did your choice to eat a beef burger instead of a bean burger cost the world? How many have you eaten, have all the AI haters eaten, across their life time?
You won’t like the answer.
20 years of experience, for what it’s worth, and a vehemently disagree. But to extend an olive branch, I think a big reason for the seemingly polar opposite reception of LLM coding online is the context.
If you give an LLM all the tools it needs to write, research and verify it’s code, to test the result (for example, in a browser), give it access to all the context it needs, like documentation, use it for code that is new, but not largely novel (CRUD business app vs. invent a new algorithm) and a competent person uses it, it’s genuinely great. Great in a way no sane person could deny.
Inversely, if you’re working in a shitty environment already, without documentation, where everything exists as implicit knowledge in peoples heads, where you can’t test and develop freely, where you’re forced to use shit LLMs or “hardened” aka shitty tools, for a extremely uncommon domain, you might have worse experiences.
I completely disagree. I am completely confident that an Opus 5.5 will code circles around the average developer. I’ve also had to rewrite AI slop, but I did it with AI. Came out great. Turns out, knowing how to use a tool makes a real difference. It’s like saying knifes are shit at cutting because a lot of dumb fucks keep holding it the wrong way.
So a state or publicly owned AI would therefore be ok? Because this sounds a lot like a (very valid) criticism of capitalism and capitalist companies doing evil capitalist things, not of AI or LLMs in general.
We sort of, kind of have public AI with the open weight models. The way people hate on AI, it doesn’t seem they care about that distinction.
But I rarely want the output twice? At least in this domain of coding, the entire point is doing it once.
Secondly, I can definitely validate it in most ways that matter. Ironically, by compiling it for example, I make 100% certain the output was well defined code. Type checking, linting, tests, etc. all help ensure I got functionally valid code.
At that point I might not really care if the function name or a variable name is different, just like I don’t care that the compiler did some kind of heuristic optimization or minified the names or something.
In both cases, I have a target functionality, and I need to validate it was reached. The way I got there doesn’t matter (in most cases).
It’s a bit like Docker vs. Nix. Sure, docker isn’t really reproducible perfectly, but it fulfills it’s goal for most people most of the time for a fraction of the time and effort taken.
Which is very different from compilers, especially for large languages with existing open source code. Those you just change willy nilly, as you want.
Ah yes, because even a single fucking percent of people that use an interpreter or compiler understand how they work, let alone can create one, or validate their output.
Have you heard of open weight models, or are you just willfully ignorant?
Maybe you’re stupid? Because the argument seems pretty fucking clear. Is a compiler deterministic towards the INTENDED functionality? I input instructions in the front and out comes something that produces the EXACT functionality I INTENDED? Because that’s the relevant comparison here.
Ok, how the fuck is that relevant to the argument?? LLMs write code, then deterministically it gets compiled, type checked, linted, etc. At that point you absolutely have deterministic code that is as valid as can be verified. EXACTLY like if a human wrote it. Unless you’re suggesting that programmers never made mistakes that don’t show up in tests…
Is Google Maps also an addiction? I’m entirely certain it’s reduced or even eliminated peoples ability to navigate to places by memory, eye or even the stars.
Fucking Socrates was against writing, because people would become lazy and not remember stuff and not discuss stuff and not listen, because they could just read it.
It is a fucking tool, because every person gets to decide how it’s used. You see lazy idiots use AI without knowledge or skill, and then assume the problem is AI, instead of the people. These people copy pasted Stack Overflow before, they didn’t change.
Why remove a tool from everyone, just because some idiots exist?
Well, the issue is that people want to turn off AI, but not these other things. It’s like, only the newest bad thing counts. The bad things I like (like meat every day) are actually fine, somehow…