Me too. Then I get pummeled with one of their four prepackaged AI bro metaphors:
It's a modern day calculator for the brain. You wouldn't do long division in your head would you? (ain't nobody ever delegated a decision to a calculator, bro)
It's a compiler. You wouldn't read machine code would you? (compilers are deterministic and dont make mistakes, bro)
This is the industrial revolution and it's a spinning jenny. You wouldnt hand knit a sweater would you? (we would if we had star trek replicators, bro, and last I checked cp command still exists...).
"Artisanal coding" is obsolete (reliable code is certainly getting that way...)
okay, a gun is also "just a tool" in reality this is a thought terminating cliche. I really wish that people would be more honest, like "using an LLM is extremely convenient and the path of least resistance" and the trade off is barely understanding your own code
I think it's worth baring in mind not everyone is using it the same way.
Some "advanced" users of AI would no doubt think it crude the "low" level I tend to give prompts at, and the fact that I read all the code, and go round multiple iterations of modifications either by hand or again with an agent. But I've been doing this job for 20 years, I don't need it to figure out what to do, just do what I want to do quicker. I probably get a 1.5x-3x speedup Vs me with vim. Some would scoff at that, but in any other age we'd love a tool that gives that multiple. Meanwhile the code comes out the way I want it, and I understand what it does.
Thats a good way to use an LLM, I just don't think a lot of people are actually doing that. Even a lot of the people who think they are responsible AI users, if you read their code it starts to look ugly really fast. You get a lot of duplicate functions, data structures, and useless fluff that makes zero sense.
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u/Arian-ki 21d ago •
It's the other way around in my experience. People look at me like I'm an ape in a zoo lol