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

You speak with a passive voice, as if the future is something that happens to you, rather than something that you participate in.

There is an old cliché about stopping the tide coming in. I mean, yeah you can get out there and participate in trying to stop it.

This isn't about fatalism or even pessimism. The tide coming in isn't good or bad. It's more like the refrain from Game of Thrones: Winter is coming. You prepare for it. Your time might be better served finding shelter and warm clothing rather than engaging in a futile attempt to prevent it.

The last tide being the blockchain (hype), which was supposed to solve all and everyone's problems about a decade ago already.

How come there even is anything left to solve for LLMs?

The difference between hype and reality is productivity—LLMs are productively used by hundreds of millions of people. Block chain is useful primarily in the imagination.

It’s just really not comparable.

No, it's overinvestment.

And I don't see how most people are divided in two groups or appear to be.

Either it's total shit, or it's the holy cup of truth, here to solve all our problems.

It's neither. It's a tool. Like a shovel, it's good at something. And like a shovel it's bad at other things. E.g. I wouldn't use a shovel to hammer in a nail.

LLMs will NEVER become true AGI. But do they need to? No, or course not!

My biggest problem with LLMs isn't the shit code they produce from time to time, as I am paid to resolve messes, it's the environmental impact of MINDLESSLY using one.

But whatever. People like cults and anti-cults are cults too.

Your concern is the environmental impact? Why pick on LLMs vs Amazon or your local drug store? Or a local restaurant, for that matter?

Do the calculations for how much LLM use is required to equal one hamburger worth of CO2 — or the CO2 of commuting to work in a car.

If my daily LLM environmental impact is comparable to my lunch or going to work, it’s really hard to fault, IMO. They aren’t building data centers in the rainforest.

Why do you assume I am not concerned about the other sources of environmental impact?

Of course I don't go around posting everything I am concerned about when we are talking about a specific topic.

You're aware tho, that because of the AI hype sustainability programs were cut at all major tech firms?