[spicyusername]

    We’ll miss creating something we feel proud of, something true and right and good. We’ll miss the satisfaction of the artist’s signature at the bottom of the oil painting, the GitHub repo saying “I made this.”

I definitely feel this some days. It used to be that I would nitpick code to death to get it just so, proud of the artistic decisions I made. Not only was it functional, but it was beautiful, crisp, elegant, clever.

Just the right abstractions. Complicated problems reduced to perfectly legible structures, easy to read for newcomers, easy to extend when new problems arise.

Extracting that from an LLM just doesn't produce the same feeling, even when it produces the same results. And they don't reliably produce the same results yet even, just poor imitations, however functional.

On the other hand, when they work, I am empowered to produce code I would have never thought of. I'm empowered to bounce an idea off an oracle that knows all the answers, and can tailor its responses to my exact use case. I'm coming around to finding the joy in that. I have to.

[elzbardico]

I still nitpick it to death. If anything, I have more opportunities to nitpick code. LLM code is usually filthy: terrible abstractions, no care for complexity, cohesion, and coupling metrics.

Debugging with LLMs is also a mixed experience; they can identify plenty of hypotheses very well, thanks to millions of dollars spent in RL, but they lack a more profound understanding of causal chains. They will try to change more than one thing at a time, even when doing so will completely invalidate the experiment; they will get into bizarre loops and weird tangents. They can help a lot, but if you want to have good results, it is way better if you strongly take control of the steering wheel.

LLMs are basically the average developer, although with way more breadth. But still not much depth.