The Rise of Whatever

Love this writing. One paragraph hit very close to home. I used to be the guy who could figure out obscure scripts by google-fu and rtfm and willpower. Now that skill has been completely obliterated by LLMs and everyone’s doing it- except it’s mostly whatever

> I don’t want to help someone who opens with “I don’t know how to do this so I asked ChatGPT and it gave me these 200 lines but it doesn’t work”.

I am still the guy doing google-fu and rtfm.

The skill has not been obliterated. We still need to fix the slop written by the LLMs, but it is not that bad.

Some people copy and paste snippets of code without knowing what it does, and in a sense, they spread technical debt around.

LLMs lower the technical debt spread by the clueless, to a lower baseline.

The issue I see is that the amount of code having this level of technical debt is created at a much faster speed now.

> LLMs lower the technical debt spread by the clueless, to a lower baseline.

Yeah? What about what LLMs help with? Do you have no code that could use translation (move code that looks like this to code that looks like that)? LLMs are real good with that, and they save dozens of hours on single sentence prompt tasks, even if you have to review them.

Or is it all bad? I have made $10ks this year alone on what LLMs do, for $10s of dollars of input, but I must understand what I am doing wrong.

Or do you mean, if you are a man with a very big gun, you must understand what that gun can do before you pull the trigger? Can only the trained can pull the trigger?