In five years time, some CTO will review the mysterious outage or technical debt in their organisation.
They will unearth a mess of poorly written, poorly -documented, barely-functioning code their staff don’t understand.
They will conclude that they did not actually save money by replacing human developers with LLMs.
#AI #LLM #LargeLanguageModels #WebDev #Coding #Tech #Technology @technology
Yep. This is the old school way of thinking that leads to things being shitty and not improving. “Why change if it’s not broke?” Cue Uber, Google, Netflix any tech company that replaced the old guards.
Which have all descended, or are in the process of descending, into suckitude because of business issues rather than technical ones. And trying to replace programmers with LLMs is fundamentally a business issue.
They may be failing but they have replaced the industry so it’s irrelevant.
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Do you use Yahoo or AltaVista to search?
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Do you still use taxis?
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Do you use Blockbuster or subscribe to a standard cable package?
I’d wager you say no to all of them. So while the old may be right, it’s irrelevant because they were still outperformed and no longer exist or are just not as competitive.
Again, people get hung up on the best or right way to do things when the reality is that’s not how business works.
You’d lose that wager, actually—this area has at least two taxi companies but no ride shares (Uber and Lyft have very little penetration in Canada outside a few specific cities), and our household does subscribe to a standard cable TV package, although it’s mostly for the benefit of my elderly mother. Those companies have not been nearly as disruptive as some people think they have.
(As for Google’s search engine, I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole these days. And Yahoo and AltaVista both sucked even when they were popular—I preferred InfoSeek, back in the day.)