zlacker

>>tablet+(OP)
I like Thomas, but I find his arguments include the same fundamental mistake I see made elsewhere. He acknowledged that the tools need an expert to use properly, and as he illustrated, he refined his expertise over many years. He is of the first and last generation of experienced programmers who learned without LLM assistance. How is someone just coming out of school going to get the encouragement and space to independently develop the experience they need to break out of the "vibe coding" phase? I can almost anticipate an interjection along the lines of "well we used to build everything with our hands and now we have tools etc, it's just different" but this is an order of magnitude different. This is asking a robot to design and assemble a shed for you, and you never even see the saw, nails, and hammer being used, let alone understand enough about how the different materials interact to get much more than a "vibe" for how much weight the roof might support.

>>parado+4u
I think the main difference between shortcuts like "compilers" and shortcuts like "LLMs" is determinism. I don't need to know assembly because I use a compiler that is very well specified, often mathematically proven to introduce no errors, and errs on the side of caution unless specifically told otherwise.

On the other hand, LLMs are highly nondeterministic. They often produce correct output for simple things, but that's because those things are simple enough that we trust the probability of it being incorrect is implausibly low. But there's no guarantee that they won't get them wrong. For more complicated things, LLMs are terrible and need very well specified guardrails. They will bounce around inside those guardrails until they make something correct, but that's more of a happy accident than a mathematical guarantee.

LLMs aren't a level of abstraction, they are an independent entity. They're the equivalent of a junior coder who has no long term memory and thus needs to write everything down and you just have to hope that they don't forget to write something down and hope that some deterministic automated test will catch them if they do forget.

If you could hire an unpaid intern with long term memory loss, would you?

>>hatthe+GC
Exactly. Compilers etc. are like well-proven algebraic properties, you can build on them and reason with them and do higher level math with confidence. That's a very different type of "advancement" than what we're seeing with LLMs.