>Reviewing is worse than writing

I think the reason this discussion keeps coming up is that the people who are getting a lot out of these tools are people who are, at best, the software-equivalent of assembly-line workers. If something can be easily understood by passively reading it then it probably isn't complicated or novel and therefore it's not surprising a pseudorandom bullshit generator can do it for you; all it lacks is a unit testing system which can verify that its interpretation of the problem-statement matches the interpretation which would be most obvious to a human and that is evidently not a solved problem thus far.

If the hardest part of your job is understanding code written by other people and even code written by yourself in the distant past, then LLMs are of literal use because the problem they solve was never a significant bottleneck and in fact their "solution" only serves to pump a higher volume of fluid through the neck of the proverbial bottle.

It's the difference between reading somebody's paper in a mathematical journal to understand how they came to the conclusion they are presenting, and merely using the identity they have proven on faith. If all that mattered was to perform some calculation based on their work then its clear which approach will get more work done in less time but if you don't take it for granted that everything in the journal is correct or if you want to be able to further develop ideas based upon their proof then you have to spend a few days or even weeks trying to understand how each step leads to its successor.

It's also why i hate the old adage about not reinventing wheels, it promotes ignorance by asserting that education itself is ignorance.

I’m glad to hear someone say that. I’ve been wrestling for weeks with the idea of reinventing a particular wheel in my profession, for a personal coding project. The problem is that my implementation can’t ever be as complete or as useful as the existing solutions because it’s way too much for one person to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time.

But, I like it, I’ve reinvented many wheels in my work and it’s benefited me greatly. So I will reinvent this particular wheel as well…