I'm frankly exhausted from AI takes from both pessimists and optimists--people are applying a vast variety of mental models to predict the future during what could be a paradigm shift. A lot of the content I see on here is often only marginally more insightful than the slop on LinkedIn. Unfortunately the most intelligent people are most susceptible to projecting their intelligence on these LLMs and not seeing it: LLMs mirror back a person's strengths and flaws.
I've used these tools on-and-off an awful lot, and I decided last month to entirely stop using LLMs for programming (my one exception is if I'm stuck on a problem longer than 2-3 hours). I think there is little cost to not getting acquainted with these tools, but there is a heavy cognitive cost to offloading critical thinking work that I'm not willing to pay yet. Writing a design document is usually just a small part of the work. I tend to prototype and work within the code as a living document, and LLMs separate me from incurring the cost of incorrect decisions fully.
I will continue to use LLMs for my weird interests. I still use them to engage on spiritual questions since they just act as mirrors on my own thinking and there is no right answer (my side project this past year was looking through the Christian Gospels and some of the Nag Hammadi collection from a mystical / non-dual lens).
I think that's a very extreme take in the software industry. Sure you don't need to pick up every new trend, but a ridiculous amount has changed in the past 10 years. If you only consider stuff from 2016, you're missing some incredible advancements.
You'd be missing stuff like:
- Containers
- Major advancement in mainstream programming languages
- IaC
There's countless more things that enable shipping of software of a completely different nature than was available back then.
Maybe these things don't apply to what you work on, but the software industry has completely changed over time and has enabled developers to build software on a different scale than ever previously possible.
I agree there's too much snake-oil and hype being sold, but that's a crazy take.
It's not that I refuse to acknowledge they exist, just don't give a fuck. I mean do I really care about Kubernetes CNI? Nope it doesn't actually make any money - it's an operational cost at the end of the day. And the whole idea of Kubernetes and containers leads to a huge operational staffing cost just to keep enough context in house to be able to keep the plates spinning.
And it's not at all crazy. We sold ourselves into over-complex architecture and knowledge cults. I've watched more products burn in the 4-5 year window due to bad tech decisions and vendors losing interest than I care to remember. Ride the hype up the ramp and hope it'll stick is not something you should be building a business on.
On that ingress-nginx. Yeah abandoned. Fucked everyone over. Here we go again...
where these tools really shine is in the hand of someone who knows what they want soup-to-nuts, knows what is correct and what is not, but just doesn't want type it all out and set it all up. For those people, these tools are a breath of fresh air.
I remember reading a comment a few days ago where someone said coding with an agent (claude code) made them excited to code again. After spending some time with these things i see their point. You can bypass the hours and hours of typing and fixing syntax and just go directly to what you want to do.
I've used these tools on-and-off an awful lot, and I decided last month to entirely stop using LLMs for programming (my one exception is if I'm stuck on a problem longer than 2-3 hours). I think there is little cost to not getting acquainted with these tools, but there is a heavy cognitive cost to offloading critical thinking work that I'm not willing to pay yet. Writing a design document is usually just a small part of the work. I tend to prototype and work within the code as a living document, and LLMs separate me from incurring the cost of incorrect decisions fully.
I will continue to use LLMs for my weird interests. I still use them to engage on spiritual questions since they just act as mirrors on my own thinking and there is no right answer (my side project this past year was looking through the Christian Gospels and some of the Nag Hammadi collection from a mystical / non-dual lens).