11–19 of 19 posts
It's still hard to stop yourself from constant bikesheding, reorganizing, etc, but yeah, mentally it's a different bag of tricks you need to learn.
Agent coding hype is marketing to push FOMO on devs in order to trick them into turning off their brain in exchange for money. They get hooked at work where they are likely more than happy to let a machine barf out boring code they likely didn't want to write in the first place. Then they bring that practice home. It's digital crack for devs.
The harness though is real; the LLM does not do anything interesting without a set of tools, specific prompts to use them, and taking a lot of forced context planning out of the dev's hands.
But yeah, usually when you mix business interests without customer concerns, those business interests develop dark patterns so they can invent concerns and then solve them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which part of the post feels LLM written to you? Not snark, I’m genuinely curious. I’ve recently started writing again, after well over a decade, so I’m not very up to date on how things are done and perceived. FWIW, I write these on Google Docs and then port them over to my site. Earlier posts had an AI disclaimer saying I used Google Docs which presumably uses AI for spellchecking and obvious grammar issues but it…
I should say that the OP didn't actually scream LLM to me. I was just making a general reply to the parent comment's statement about LLM writing. I should have made that clear. I, too, would be curious what they found so obviously sloppy about this post. It seems to me like it had a human voice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being able to write well is arguably one of the most important things any person can ever learn, as you can't write well without thinking well. So, I immediately write-off anyone who produces their writing with LLMs, as it is quite apparent that they are not a serious, thoughtful person and are instead just cosplaying as one via LLM. The fact that they can't see this (or, worse, think the slop actually makes them loo…
Which part of the post feels LLM written to you? Not snark, I’m genuinely curious. I’ve recently started writing again, after well over a decade, so I’m not very up to date on how things are done and perceived. FWIW, I write these on Google Docs and then port them over to my site. Earlier posts had an AI disclaimer saying I used Google Docs which presumably uses AI for spellchecking and obvious grammar issues but it…
They were so burned out that they decided to use an LLM to write this blog post. It should be embarrassing to people that they can’t even write a whole argument out by hand. It’s not that hard. All you have to do is believe in it. This blog post is just selling the idea of engineering as craft. It exists to make us feel good about having skills and to get us to regurgitate our priors in the comments. We should at lea…
Usually, I start with a solid idea that needs hands on experience to fully developin, so I need to stay in the loop. Than I have to force myself to carefully review the code and point out architectural issues (usually there sneak in a lot of them). If I don't force myself, I end up in a limbo where the agent produces code faster than my mental model following.
Even if I have a well developed domain knowledge and a good idea what I want, I then definitely feel some kind of, what I guess compares to, slot machine effect. "Maybe now I get what I want. Argh, not quite. Okay, feels nearly there. Perhaps only this prompt. Ah, there is something missing...".
I'm really curious how you handle and approach this.
It got me back into enjoying things more