Programming

I use AI coding tools, and I often find them quite useful, but I completely agree with this statement:

And if you think of LLMs as an extra teammate, there's no fun in managing them either. Nurturing the personal growth of an LLM is an obvious waste of time.^___^

At first I found AI coding tools like a junior developer, in that it will keep trying to solve the problem, and never give up or grow frustrated. However, I can't teach an LLM, yes I can give it guard rails and detailed prompts, but it can't learn in the same way a teammate can. It will always require supervision and review of its output. Whereas, I can teach a teammate new or different ways to do things, and over time their skills and knowledge will grow, as will my trust in them.

I've maintained for a while that LLMs don't make you a more productive programmer, they just let you write bad code faster.

90% of the job isn't writing code anyway. Once I know what code I wanna write, banging it out is just pure catharsis.

Glad to see there's other programmers out there who actually take pride in their work.

This is exactly how I feel about LLM's. I will use them if I have to to get something done that would be time consuming or tedious. But I would never willingly sign up for a job where that's all it is.

If you think of LLMs as an extra teammate, there's no fun in managing them either. Nurturing the personal growth of an LLM is an obvious waste of time. Micromanaging them, watching to preempt slop and derailment, is frustrating and rage-inducing.

Finetuning LLMs for niche tasks is fun. It's explorative, creative, cumulitive, and scratches a 'must optimize' part of my brain. It feels like you're actually building and personalizing something, and teaches you how they work and where they fail, like making any good program or tool. It feels you're part of a niche 'old internet' hacking community, not in the maw of Big Tech.

Using proprietary LLMs over APIs is indeed soul crushing. IMO this is why devs who have to use LLMs should strive to run finetunable, open weights models where they work, even if they aren't as good as Claude Code.

But I think most don't know they exist. Or had a terrible experience with terrible ollama defaults, hence assume that must be what the open model ecosystem is like.

A simple, but succinct summary of the real cost of LLMs. Literally, everything human for something that is just a twisted reflection of the greed of the richest.

Argument doesn't check out. You can still manage people, and they can use whatever tools make them productive. Good understanding of the code & ability to pass PR reviews isn't going anywhere, nor is programmer skill

If it allows to kick out code faster to meet whatever specs/acceptance criteria laid out before me, fine. The hell do I care if the code is good or bad. If it works, it works. My company doesn’t give af about me. I’m just a number. No matter how many “we are family” speeches they give. Or try to push the “we are all a team and will win”….we aren’t all a team. Why should I care more than “does it work”. As long as profits go up, the company is happy. They don’t care how good or pretty my code is.

Disagree