331–340 of 1001 posts
> Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs. So then where do the junior developers come from? And then where do the senior developers come from?
This is dead right; my AI skeptic friend are ideologically opposed to LLMs and GenAI.
Their arguments have nothing to do with how good or bad LLMs are:
- IP issues (for code in a jupyter notebook which will never face IP scrutiny)
- because it exploits slaves and poor people (but so does the computer they use and the clothes they wear).
I also have a few programmer friends who make more legitimate complaints about code quality but because they are friends there is also an obvious subtext of ideological opposition.
My opinion is you should use LLMs anyway; you can hate "capitalism" and still take advantage of the system.
Most completely reasonable objections to LLMs were totally dismissed.
> An LLM can be instructed to just figure all that shit out. Often, it will drop you precisely at that golden moment where shit almost works, and development means tweaking code and immediately seeing things work better. Well, except that in order to fix that 1% you'd need to read and understand whatever the LLM did and then look for that 1%. I get the shills just thinking about this, whether the original programmer…
I am finding the most destructive aspect of LLM assistance to be the loss of flow state. Most of the time I can go faster than these tools if I have confidence in myself and allow the momentum to build up over the course of 20-30 minutes. Every time I tab out to an LLM is like a 5 minute penalty over what I could have done unaided on a good day. Getting the model prepared to help you in a realistic domain often takes…
Finally someone else mentions Flow!
I have one very specific retort to the 'you are still responsible' point. High school kids write lots of notes. The notes frequently never get read, but the performance is worse without them: the act of writing them embeds them into your head. I allegedly know how to use a debugger, but I haven't in years: but for a number I could count on my fingers, nearly every bug report I have gotten I know exactly down to the l…
One of the biggest anti LLM arguments for me at the moments is about security. In case you don't know, if you open a file with copilot active or cursor, containing secrets, it might be sent to a server a thus get leaked. The companies say that if that file is in a cursorignore file, it won't be indexed, but it's still a critical security issue IMO. We all know what happened with the "smart home assistants" like Alexa…
Too many vibe coders contribute trash code if any. They need more code from so called experts that isn't open source yet.
>If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing. Here’s the thing from the skeptic perspective: This statement keeps getting made on a rolling basis. 6 months ago if I wasn’t using the life-changing, newest LLM at the time, I was also doing it wrong and being a luddite. It creates a never ending treadmill of boy-who-cried-LLM. Why…
Dude, just try the things out. It's just undeniable in my day-to-day life that I've been able to rely on Sonnet (first 3.7 and now 4.0) and Gemini 2.5 to absolutely crush code. I've done 3 side projects in the past 6 months that I would have been way too lazy to build without these tools. They work. Never going back.
Curious how he reconciles this: > If you build something with an LLM that people will depend on, read the code. In fact, you’ll probably do more than that. You’ll spend 5-10 minutes knocking it back into your own style. with Joel Spolsky's fundamental maxim: > It’s harder to read code than to write it. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
The privacy aspect and other security risks tho? So far all the praise I hear on productivity are from people using cloud-hosted models. Claude, Gemini, Copilot and and ChatGPT are non-starters for privacy-minded folks. So far, local experiements with agents have left me underwhelmed. Tried everything on ollama that can run on my dedicated Ryzen 8700G with 96GB DDR5. I'm ready to blow ~10-15k USD on a better rig if I…