zlacker

"nother counterfactual that we'll never know is what kinds of tooling we would have gotten if people had dumped a few billion dollars into code tool improvement without LLMs, but with, say, a lot of more conventional ML tooling. Would the tools we get be much better? Much worse? About the same but different in strengths and weaknesses? Impossible to say."

You'll not only never know this, it's IMHO not very useful to think about at all, except as an intellectual exercise.

I wish i could impress this upon more people.

A friend similarly used to lament/complain that Kotlin sucked in part because we could have probably accomplished it's major features in Java, and maybe without tons of work, or migration cost.

This is maybe even true!

as an intellectual exercise, both are interesting to think about. But outside of that, people get caught up in this as if it matters, but it doesn't.

Basically nothing is driven by pure technical merit alone, not just in CS, but in any field. So my point to him was the lesson to take away from this is not "we could have been more effective or done it cheaper or whatever" but "my definition of effectiveness doesn't match how reality decides effectiveness, so i should adjust my definition".

As much as people want the definition to be a meritocracy, it just isn't and honestly, seems unlikely to ever be.

So while it's 100% true that billions of dollars dumped into other tools or approaches or whatever may have have generated good, better, maybe even amazing results, they weren't, and more importantly, never would have been. Unknown but maybe infinite ROI is often much more likely to see investment than more known but maybe only 2x ROI.

and like i said, this is not just true in CS, but in lots of fields.

That is arguably quite bad, but also seems unlikely to change.

>>DannyB+(OP)
> You'll not only never know this, it's IMHO not very useful to think about at all, except as an intellectual exercise.

I think it's very useful if one wants to properly weigh the value of LLMs in a way that gets beyond the hype. Which I do.

>>wpietr+ip3
Sure, and that works in the abstract (ie "what investment would theoretically have made the most sense") but if you are trying to compare in the real world you have to be careful because it assumes the alternative would have ever happened. I doubt it would have.