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Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

403 points · 476 comments · lladnar

  1. alkonaut · · focus · HN ↗
    Programming has five phases effectively:

    1) You figure out what problem to solve.

    2) You figure out HOW to solve the problem.

    3) You actually implement the solution.

    4) You see the solution work, for yourself.

    5) You ship/deploy/publish the program. This means you see people be happy users and/or you get paid for it and so on.

    If you're an entrepreneur type, you probably enjoy the first and last steps most, and you see steps 2-4 as mostly a chore. If you're a tinkerer, you don't care much for 1 and 5, and you see 2-4 as the whole point of programming. I'm a tinkerer. I'd be happy to just write code and throw it away. Coding is like solving sudokus. I could skip steps 1 and 5 forever. I don't ever need to show any code to anyone. In fact, most of the time when programming I do steps 2 and 3 and even skip 4. I don't even finish! I work weeks on something until I lose interest, and I know that in order to even run it, it would be several more weeks. A PoC is enough. Or just a half one. It's just code-to-structure-thoughts, not to create anything finished.

    The 5 phases look kind of symmetric. The outermost layer (1 and 5) are the entrepreneurial steps. If you're a product owner or CEO, you might work strictly at steps 1,5. Then steps 2-4 are the managerial/architectural steps. If you're a very senior IC at a large company, you might work at this level, without actually doing much coding. Only the inner most step (3) is the manual creation of source code. Even though it's 5 different phases, it's just "3 layers" of programming.

    The problem as I see it is that I enjoy step 3. And LLMs are good at step 3 almost exclusively. So they just pick the best bit of this dish, and leave me with the rest.

    If you're an entrepreneurial type, the LLM appears to take the _worst_ bit of the work from you. Great.

    1. shiomiru · · focus · HN ↗
      There's also the economic problem that programmers had until recently been highly regarded because steps 2-3 were hard. "Open source" solved this partially by utilizing the labor such (relatively) well-paid people gave away "for the love of it", but it was not nearly enough to put most out of work.

      Now there is a plagiarism machine built on top of decades of this work that seemingly solves 3 and promises to solve 2 (badly, but usually this matters little), the programmers that (indirectly) helped build it are told they're fools for doing so, and threatened by losing their status if they don't adapt to the "entrepreneurial way" (well, the full promise is "you'll lose it anyway, but if you cooperate in stuffing sama's pockets then maybe you get to keep it a bit longer").

      So what really surprises me is not that people are upset but that so few are.

      1. pigpop · · focus · HN ↗
        Maybe I'm just old but people talking about being in programming for "status" or to be "highly regarded" really irks me. I'd rather see the entire field burnt to the ground and replaced by robots than to have it become a status profession like lawyering.
        1. bananaflag · · focus · HN ↗
          Could you elaborate?

          I think back in the 90s when I was a teenager I thought it to be a good thing that there is a rise in status for a class of people characterized by clear thinking.

          1. embedding-shape · · focus · HN ↗
            The older I get, the more I realize how many problems in society is because there are different "classes" of people. The more we can eschew that, the better it becomes for most people. While yes, I also see myself as having "clearer thinking" than many people , maybe because of the thousands of hours building and maintaining software, I'm not of the impression that my life deserves a higher status than others merely because of this. It's not "they think right and they think wrong", it's just "everyone thinks differently, but it's all valid thinking".
            1. elmer2 · · focus · HN ↗
              We all should be in the same 'class', but some people will be paid more for a job that takes intelligence or years of study.

              The older I get, I realize some people never change, will always have the same backwards or harmful thinking, and I avoid them instead of just accepting it.

              1. embedding-shape · · focus · HN ↗
                > some people will be paid more for a job that takes intelligence or years of study.

                Sadly, it seems so, even if the effects of the jobs on daily life differ a great deal sometimes. The world would succumb faster if we had no garbage collectors, yet they get less pay than a programmer who the world could easily survive without? Makes no sense to me.

                1. GTP · · focus · HN ↗
                  The basic services that keep us alive (e.g. farmers producing our food) tend to also be "easy" (it is physically demanding, but doesn't require years of study to start and you quickly learn by doing). This also means that the vast majority of people would be able to do this kind of jobs. Our economy pays more for scarcity, i.e. jobs that are in demand and at the same time require more qualification, so that the number of people needed in that position tends to be less than the current amount. Both views have sense, they just start from two different points.
                  1. Tanoc · · focus · HN ↗
                    From having worked with farmers, the actual logistics of running a farm are very complex. Farming's no longer an easy job because the demand for productivity means you have to harness a whole stable of technologies and understand to some degree advanced finances, floral biology, geotechnics, and meteorology. And yet farmers still get paid little relative to the breadth of knowledge and skills required for running a farm. It's just that farming is still considered a blue-collar job because it was the domain of the poorest for millenia, where as software engineering in any form is relatively new and thus specialized and so considered white-collar.
                    1. GTP · · focus · HN ↗
                      You're right, running now a farm that is profitable and can stay on the market is very different from doing so 200 years ago. But knowledge is just one aspect. The other aspect I mentioned is having less people in the field than what the market asks for. In the specific case of farmers, I think that modern farms are so much more efficient that we need way less than before, even if the world's population grew. So, while there's a gap between the knowledge required and the earnings, I think this can be explained by farms having a much greater output now, and so the market doesn't ask for more farms than what we have. This could be false at a global scale, but I think it is true at a country-level scale in most of the developed countries. Hence why farmers aren't paid much in those countries.
                      1. pigpop · · focus · HN ↗
                        Farmers aren't really paid, they sell goods at market prices. Modern farms are more similar to operating a manufacturing business than they are to a salaried position or profession. They don't earn high incomes compared to white collar professions but they do have high revenues and they pay themselves a reasonable middle class income on average with some added benefits from owning large assets and land. The important part about comparing farmers to programmers is that they are both now operating in highly competitive markets with high automation where a single individual can leverage their knowledge and ability using that automation to produce many times more what a person could using only their own labor.
                        1. win311fwg · · focus · HN ↗
                          > Farmers aren't really paid, they sell goods at market prices.

                          "Programmers aren't really paid, they sell services at market prices." — I guess nobody gets paid?

                          As a farmer myself, when I give someone something I produced and they give me back something in return, I consider myself to be paid. If I did not receive much value in return for what I gave, I'd reasonably consider myself to have not been paid well. I have never met a farmer that would consider that usage unusual. Payment refers to a transaction within the realm of a human activity. The good or service that is being traded between humans is immaterial. While you are free to define words as you see fit, your assertion doesn't really reflect how this is actually used in practice, generally. The rest of the earlier comment makes it clear that the commenter understands how a farm business works.

                          1. arzig · · focus · HN ↗
                            What he means to say is that because you are a farmer you are a member of the capital holding classes rather than the lumpen proletariat.

                            </sarcasm>

                            1. win311fwg · · focus · HN ↗
                              Most programmers are of the capital holding class too. At very least they will own a computer, which is all the capital you need for 99% of what programmers do. There are exceptions, but there are also exceptions in farming.
                              1. inigyou · · focus · HN ↗
                                The capital holding class isn't anyone who holds capital. It's anyone whose main function in society is based on holding capital. Think of a landlord.
                          2. hunterpayne · · focus · HN ↗
                            Did someone seriously just down-mod a farmer in a sub-discussion about running a farm?
                            1. inigyou · · focus · HN ↗
                              Did you seriously just appeal to authority yourself?
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