Agreed, although LLMs definitely qualify as enabling developers compared to <social media, Steam, consoles, and other distractions> of today.

The Internet itself is full of distractions. My younger self spent a crazy amount of time on IRC. So it's not different than spending time on say, Discord today.

LLMs have pretty much a direct relationship with Google. The quality of the response has much to do with the quality of the prompt. If anything, it's the overwhelming nature of LLMs that might be the problem. Back in the day, if you had, say a library access, the problem was knowing what to look for. Discoverability with LLMs is exponential.

As for LLM as auto-complete, there is an argument to be made that typing a lot reinforces knowledge in the human brain like writing. This is getting lost, but with productivity gains.

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girvo 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Watching my juniors constantly fight the nonsense auto completion suggestions their LLM editor of choice put in front of them, or worse watching them accept it and proceed to get entirely lost in the sauce, I’m not entirely convinced that the autocompletion part of it is the best one.

Tools like Claude code with ask/plan mode seem to be better in my experience, though I absolutely do wonder about the lack of typing causing a lack of memory formation

A rule I set myself a long time ago was to never copy paste code from stack overflow or similar websites. I always typed it out again. Slower, but I swear it built the comprehension I have today.

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keyle 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Watching my juniors constantly fight the nonsense auto completion suggestions their LLM editor of choice put in front of them, or worse watching them accept it and proceed to get entirely lost in the sauce, I’m not entirely convinced that the autocompletion part of it is the best one.

That's not an LLM problem, they'd do the same thing 10 years ago with stack overflow: argue about which answer is best, or trust the answer blindly.

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girvo 3 hours ago | parent [-]

No, it is qualitatively different because it happens in-line and much faster. If it’s not correct (which it seems it usually isn’t), they spend more time removing whatever garbage it autocompleted.

	▲	menaerus an hour ago \| parent [-]
		People do it with the autocomplete as well so I guess there's not that much of a difference wrt LLMs. It likely depends on the language but people who are inexperienced in C++ would be over-relying on autocomplete to the point that it looks hilarious, if you have a chance to sit next to them helping to debug something for example.

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zx8080 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> but I swear it built the comprehension I have today.

For interns/junior engineers, the choice is: comprehension VS career.

And I won't be surprised if most of them will go with career now, and comprehension.. well thanks maybe tomorrow (or never).

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christophilus 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I don’t think that’s the dichotomy. I’ve been in charge of hiring at a few companies, and comprehension is what I look for 10 times out of 10.

	▲	sysguest 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		well you could get "interview-optimized" interviewees with impressive-looking mini-projects
	▲	zenlot 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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intended 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

LLMs are in a context where they are the promised solution for most of the expected economic growth on one end, a tool to improve programmer productivity and skill while also being only better than doom scrolling?

Thats comparison undermines the integrity of the argument you are trying to make.