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The same thing we do after interns, fix it.
“The reason that tech generally — and coders in particular — see LLMs differently than everyone else is that in the creative disciplines, LLMs take away the most soulful human parts of the work and leave the drudgery to you,” [the author] says. “And in coding, LLMs take away the drudgery and leave the human, soulful parts to you.”
wtf is he talking about? You get to do spec writing, code reviews, QA and debugging - this is far from the joyful part of coding.
That’s a terrible take and its desperately trying to draw an equivalence where there isn’t one.
I’d argue that the slop code creates more drudgery with having to constantly babysit the LLM. Never mind a new blog post every week about how your “agentic workflow” from last week is all wrong and you need even more infrastructure to wrangle the LLM. It’s worse than the way the JavaScript ecosystem used to be!
Reading someone else’s code is challenging, but at least with a person you can ask them questions or debate.
I guess I’m just someone who finds reviewing someone else’s work tedious, though a necessary part of the job.
Right? That is not my preferred skill set and I don’t enjoy those things. I like understanding and designing patterns. I like feeling connected to the code and problems I’m solving, and I like feeling clever when I come up with solutions.
AI takes all of that away. It’s got more data than I can ever cram in my skull, more energy than I’ll ever have available to me, and it’s being forced on us at every corner so it has access to things I’ll never see.
Honestly I would be okay with LLMs if they weren’t killing our planet and robbing us of our humanity and creativity.
Clean up the mess that AI has made.
I think that the big, highlighted quote a few paragraphs down–which I believe is also by the author of the article, even though they refer to themselves in the third person–seems somewhat at odds with what they say in the rest of the article. I would guess that they started writing it to make an emotional argument, then tried to back it up with logic, but along the way they lost their emotional momentum and forgot exactly what they were supposed to be arguing.
There’s an interesting section further down, though:
What do we do about it? This horse is not going back in the barn. The billionaires wouldn’t let it, anyway.
There’s no need to get it back in the barn; the thing is lame, and only being kept propped up by a lot of (cash) injections and diversions. The facade will fall before they actually get it to work the way they pretend it works.
