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.