LLM Inevitabilism

I think what scares people who code for a living the most is the loss of their craft. Many of you have spent years or decades honing the craft of producing clear, fast, beautiful code. Now there is something that can spit out (often) beautiful code in seconds. An existential threat to your self worth and livelihood. A perfectly reasonable thing to react to.

I do think, however, that this is an inevitable change. Industries and crafts being massively altered by technology is a tale as old as time. In a world that constantly changes, adaptation is key.

I also think that almost all of you who have this craft should have no problem pivoting to higher level software architecture design. Work with an llm and produce things it would have taken a small team to do in 2019.

I find it to be a very exciting time.

My job security is pretty low on my list of concerns about LLMs. I wish this technology existed only for vibe coding.

I worry about the impact of LLMs to the society at large. These models hit the mainstream only a couple years ago and they already have disastrous effects. Not only people send LLM generated emails to each other, that's actually a selling point for many products. I regularly hear about people using LLMs as doctors and therapists. For many, a chatbot could be their only friend or even a partner. Genuine human-to-human interaction is being replaced by chatbots from a handful of megacorporations. It's hard to avoid it. The internet is being flooded by LLM generated garbage that looks like a human could've written it. It's easier than ever to generate misinformation and propaganda, and as a cherry on top the LLMs even help distribute it.

I don't particularly want to live in a society where any of that's considered normal. And that's not even considering the negative impact on the environment. It's hard to be excited about a technology with these downsides that I think severely outweigh any benefits.