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

Compare these positive introductory experiences with two technologies that were pushed extremely hard by commercial interests in the past decade: crypto/web3 and VR/metaverse.

Neither was ever able to offer this kind of instant usefulness. With crypto, it’s still the case that you create a wallet and then… there’s nothing to do on the platform. You’re expected to send real money to someone so they’ll give you some of the funny money that lets you play the game. (At this point, a lot of people reasonably start thinking of pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing which have the same kind of joining experience.)

With the “metaverse”, you clear out a space around you, strap a heavy thing on your head, and shut yourself into an artificial environment. After the first oohs and aahs, you enter a VR chat room… And realize the thing on your head adds absolutely nothing to the interaction.

> With crypto, it’s still the case that you create a wallet and then… there’s nothing to do on the platform. You’re expected to send real money to someone so they’ll give you some of the funny money that lets you play the game.

This became a problem later due to governments cracking down on cryptos and some terrible technical choices made transactions expensive just as adoption was ramping. (Pat yourselves on the back, small blockers.)

My first experience with crypto was buying $5 in bitcoin from a friend. If I didn't do it that way I could go on a number of websites and buy crypto without opening an account, via credit card, or via SMS. Today, most of the $5 would be eaten by fees, and buying for cash from an institution requires slow and intrusive KYC.

> buying for cash from an institution requires slow and intrusive KYC.

Hello my friend, grab a seat so we can contemplate the wickedness of man. KYC is not some authoritarian or entrenched industry response to fintech upstarts, it's a necessary thing that protects billions of people from crime and corruption.

That's an unreasonably charitable reading of the purpose of KYC. It's primarily about government control of the primary medium of economic exchange. As always, this benefits the privileged at the expense of the less privileged.

Its use to limit competition from cryptocurrency is a perfect example of that. A major market which crypto was supposed to be able to serve - the "unbanked" - are largely locked out of it. Turns out giving poor people access to money is not a feature that the system wants to allow.

The benefit you claim for KYC is a marketing bullet point side effect at best.

It doesn't really matter what use cases cryptocurrencies were supposed to have — their actual use cases turned out to be scams and speculation. We can wax philosophic about the failed promise, but to a rounding error scams and speculation have always been their only use cases.

Which makes it very understandable that crypto companies became subject to KYC laws as they tried to scale up to serve the American public! Online gambling and securities trading are already subject to KYC. The rest of the activity is the scams and crime that (despite your cynical reading) KYC was intended to fight in the first place.

If I understand the discussion correctly:

Your opinion is that the benefits of KYC (safety) outweigh the downsides of KYC (giving up liberty).

The other poster's opinion is that the downsides outweigh the benefits.

There is a quote out there regarding those who would sacrifice liberty to obtain safety, but it slips my mind at the moment.

Careening at 90 miles per hour through a school zone crosswalk as kids dive out of the way: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Yawn. If that were truly analogous to the current topic, rather than a gross exaggeration, the analogy would be unnecessary.

Replace "Careening at 90 miles per hour through a school zone crosswalk as kids dive out of the way" with the actual topic of "Spending your money on legal things without government tracking and control".

Your point is understood that you personally prefer one thing to another, compared to another person preferring the opposite.

And if you were truly able to attack my position on its merits you wouldn't need to keep stripping out all specifics to build a straw man, but here we are!

(Also, the analogy would only be necessary if it were… not analogous to the topic at hand? That makes no sense.)

Why would I attack your position? Your position is totally reasonable given a particular set of pretty common preferences ("this" over "that"). Besides, you never asked me to try to change your mind, so why would I assume you wanted me to spend my time & effort doing that work?

What's more, your "position" (opinion) is no more or less defensible than the opposite opinion held by a different person, or any opinion in general, and other people are no more obliged to "attack" yours than you are theirs (is "attacking" really a good conversation anyways?)

I'm just a third party elucidating that this is 2 people disagreeing based on their own personal preferences, which are based on their own personal opinions, and doesn't need to be a referendum on either person.

You know, I really don't appreciate this coy "I'm not attacking your position, I'm just simplifying it to a tradeoff between liberty and safety and what's that quote about liberty vs. safety again? Ah well, the reader can draw their own conclusions." Your whole "all opinions are valid, who can truly say which is more defensible?" schtick is the last refuge of people who are unable to defend their views.

It's pretty obvious what you're trying to say here, man. Don't piss on my leg and tell me that it's raining.