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just_once 4 days ago

I don't know if there's a word for this but this reads to me as like, software virtue signaling or software patronizing. It's bizarre to me to tell an engineer what their job is as a matter of fact and to claim a particular usage of a tool as mandated (a tool that no one really asked for, mind you), leveraging duty of all things.

I guess to me, it's either the case that LLMs are just another tool, in which case the already existing teachings of best practice should cover them (and therefore the tone and some content of this article is unnecessary) or they're something totally new, in which case maybe some of the already existing teachings apply, but maybe not because it's so different that the old incentives can't reasonably take hold. Maybe we should focus a little bit more attention on that.

The article mentions rudeness, shifting burdens, wasting people's time, dereliction. Really loaded stuff and not a framing that I find necessary. The average person is just trying to get by, not topple a social contract. For that, look upwards.

dkural 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I've really seen both I suppose. A lot of devs don't take accountability / responsibility for their code, especially if they haven't done anything that actually got shipped and used, or in general haven't done much responsible adulting.

just_once 4 days ago | parent [-]

No doubt. Interesting to think about why that is without assuming it's a character flaw.

simonw 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

LLMs are just another tool, but they're disruptive enough that existing best practices need to be either updated or re-explained.

A lot of people using LLMs seem not to have understood that you can't expect them to write code that works without testing it first!

If that wasn't clearly a problem I wouldn't have felt the need to write this.

just_once 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yep, it's a real problem. No dispute there.

My intention isn't to argue a point, just to share my perspective when I read it.

I read your response here to be saying something like "I noticed that people are misunderstood about X, so I wanted to inform them". In this case "X" isn't itself very obvious to me (For any given task, why can't you expect that a cutting edge LLM would be able to write it without requiring your testing that?) but most importantly, I don't think I would approach a pure misunderstanding (tantamount to a skills gap) with your particular framing. Again, to me it reads as patronizing.

Love the pelican on the bicycle, though. I think that's been a great addition to the zeitgeist.