I held out for a long time, but I finally started using LLMs in my regular coding work. I couldn't deny the utility of tools like Claude any longer, when it can do in 2 minutes what would take me an hour.
There are problems: hallucinations, verbosity, bad/unperformant/inaccessible code. I have to correct it a lot. That's OK.
The main problem I find is that it's sucked a lot of the fun out of coding for me. It's like I've been pushed into a management role when I just wanted to stay a coder.
The other issue of course is that I'm not learning as much when I use LLMs. Even if it's an iterative, back-and-forth process, the tool is doing ~80% of the thinking for me.
It feels like I either need to spend more time learning outside of coding, or just accept at some level that I'm "cashing in my chips" and relying on ~20 years of actual coding experience.
Either way, I feel less excited by these tools than defeated. They're incredible magic wands, but I kind of liked doing my own sorcery?
Of course, this is a choice: I *could* choose not to use LLMs. When I ride my bike, I don't bemoan the fact that a car could do it faster – the goal is exercise.
But nobody's paying me to ride my bike. If I were a delivery driver, it'd be pretty unprofessional to show up an hour late with a cold pizza just because I like biking.
With LLMs, it almost feels like malpractice *not* to use them at this point. I can't justify taking ~3x longer to ship a feature just because I don't enjoy using them.
I'm familiar with all the arguments against GenAI, and I'm a big fan of authors like @baldur whose excellent book, The Intelligence Illusion, I've read twice. It's highly recommended. https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/
I have a degree in computational linguistics, and that's partly why I was so skeptical of these tools for so long. I still am! But more and more I felt like the world was moving on without me. To this day I feel deeply conflicted.
@nolan I'm sure you're being bombarded with replies
But, brushing past the issues with the software industry that are enabling problematic use of LLMs: it's understandable that coders feel conflicted about them, even if you assume the tech works as promised, because you've just changed jobs
You've gone from thoughtful problem-solving to babysitting
Monitoring automation will never be an engaging activity
And, in the long run, a babysitter gets paid much less an expert
