LLM Inevitabilism

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipping, no waiting. This was the future. It was inevitable.

Yesterday I wanted to rewrite a program to use a large library that would have required me to dive deep down into the documentation or read its code to tackle my use case. As a first try, I just copy+pasted the whole library and my whole program into GPT 4.1 and told it to rewrite it using the library. It succeeded at the first attempt. The rewrite itself was small enough that I could read all code changes in 15 minutes and make a few stylistic changes. Done. Hours of time saved. This is the future. It is inevitable.

PS: Most replies seem to compare my experience to experiences that the responders have with agentic coding, where the developer is iteratively changing the code by chatting with an LLM. I am not doing that. I use a "One prompt one file. No code edits." approach, which I describe here:

https://www.gibney.org/prompt_coding

The problem with LLM is when they're used for creativity or for thinking.

Just because LLMs are indeed useful in some (even many!) context, including coding, esp. to either get something started, or, like in your example, to transcode an existing code base to another platform, doesn't mean they will change everything.

It doesn't mean “AI is the new electricity.” (actual quote from Andrew Ng in the post).

More like AI is the new VBA. Same promise: everyone can code! Comparable excitement -- although the hype machine is orders of magnitude more efficient today than it was then.

> It doesn't mean “AI is the new electricity.” (actual quote from Andrew Ng in the post).

I personally agree with Andrew Ng here (and I've literally arrived at the exact same formulation before becoming aware of Ng's words).

I take "new electricity" to mean, it'll touch everything people do, become part of every endeavor in some shape of form. Much like electricity. That doesn't mean taking over literally everything; there's plenty of things we don't use electricity for, because alternatives - usually much older alternatives - are still better.

There's still plenty of internal combustion engines on the ground, in the seas and in the skies, and many of them (mostly on extremely light and extremely heavy ends of the spectrum) are not going to be replaced by electric engines any time soon. Plenty of manufacturing and construction is still done by means of hydraulic and pneumatic power. We also sometimes sidestep electricity for heating purposes by going straight from sunlight to heat. Etc.

But even there, electricity-based technology is present in some form. The engine may be this humongous diesel-burning colossus, built from heat, metal, and a lot of pneumatics, positioned and held in place by hydraulics - but all the sensors on it are electric, where in the past some would be hydraulic and rest wouldn't even exist; it's controlled and operated by electricity-based computing network; it's been designed on computers, and so on.

In this sense, I think "AI is a new electricity" is believable. It's a qualitatively new approach to computing, that's directly or indirectly applicable everywhere, and that people already try to apply to literally everything[0]. And, much like with electricity, time and economics will tell which of those applications make sense, which were dead ends, and which were plain dumb in retrospect.

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[0] - And they really did try to stuff electricity everywhere back when it was the new hot thing. Same with nuclear energy few decades later. We still laugh at how people 100 years ago imagined the future will look like... in between crying that we got short-changed by reality.

AI is not a fundamental physical element. AI is mostly closed and controlled by people who will inevitably use it to further their power and centralize wealth and control. We acted with this in mind to make electricity a publicly controlled service. There is absolutely no intention nor political strength around to do this with AI in the West.