If I have learnt one thing working in software engineering, specifically on AI-enabled products …

> just because it’s so intent on satisfying your whim instead of saying No This really, really, really needs to be fixed. It's probably the most irritating (and potentially risky) part of the whole ecosystem. Nothing more infuriating than being give code that not only doesn't work, but upon the most casual inspection, couldn't possibly work -- especially when it's done it four or five times in a row, each time assuring you that this time the code is gonna work. Pinky swear!

> you don’t learn by figuring out a new concept This. If LLMs were actually some magical thing that could write my code for me, I wouldn't use them for exactly this reason. Using them would prevent me from learning new skills and would actively encourage my existing skillset to degrade. The thing that keeps me valuable in this industry is that I am always improving, always learning new skills. Anything that discourages that smells like career (and personal) poison to me.

This is not really a new problem, the previous version being "idk, I copy pasted it from stack overflow." True expertise realized that the answer often lay buried in sub-comments and the top voted answer is not often the correct one. LLM's naturally do not realize any of this.

>Depending on the way you phrase questions, ChatGPT will gleefully suggest you a wrong approach, just because it’s so intent on satisfying your whim instead of saying No when it would be appropriate. Which is easily solved by using another agent that is told to be critical and find all flaws in the suggested approach.

> ChatGPT will gleefully suggest you a wrong approach, just because it’s so intent on satisfying your whim instead of saying No when it would be appropriate Therein lies the mistake. Too many people assume ChatGPT (and similar LLMs) are capable of reasoning. It's not. It is simply just giving you what is likely the 'correct' answer based on some sort of pattern. It doesn't know what's wrong, so it's not aware it's giving you an inappropriate answer.

Of course you're right about today's LLMs, but the author imagines a not-too-unlikely incremental improvement on them unlocking an entirely new surface area of solutions. I really enjoyed the notion of barefoot developers, local first solutions, and the desire to wrest control over our our digital lives from the financialists. I find these ideas compelling, even though I'm politically anti-communist. The presentation was also quite lovely.

The new generation of devs are going to be barefoot and pregnant and kept in the kitchen , building on top of technologies that they do not understand, powered by companies they do not control.

Partly disagree, actually. The current web technologies are somewhat unnecessarily complicated. Most people just need basic CRUD and a useable front end for their daily tasks.