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Comment by somewhereoutth | Hacker News Reader

> developer somewhere between junior and mid-level

Why the insistence on anthropomorphizing what is just a tool? It has no agency, does not 'think' in any meaningful manner, it is just pattern matching on a vast corpus of training data. That's not to say it can't be very useful - as you seem to have found - but it is still just a tool.

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This isn’t necessarily anthropomorphizing, as from a company’s point of view, or uncharitably even from a tech leads point of view, developers are also just tools. The point being made is that LLMs (supposedly) fulfill those developer roles.

It's less about what the tool is, and more about the kind of work we often assign to less experienced developers. Pattern matching in meatspace is still pattern matching.

It's not anthropomorphising though, is it? It's just a comparison of the tool's ability. Like talking about the horsepower of an engine.

But we didn't do this with spreadsheets or word processors - and those tools really did replace small armies of clerical and secretarial workers.

The difference is AI is closing on doing the EXACT work with the EXACT info as a junior dev. Give an LLM a Jira ticket and a codebase and it can push a PR. Spreadsheets are great, but that was a tool that minimized effort but didn't remove it. LLMs can directly replace a remote junior with no visible difference already.

> Give an LLM a Jira ticket and a codebase and it can push a PR

Not really though can it, unless that codebase and Jira happens to pattern match correctly somewhere.

I'd say that the difference is just that LLMs have a natural language interface (for good or for ill).

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