Hacker News Reader

Comment by propablythrown | Hacker News Reader

I use llms everyday for coding assistance the same way I used search engines in the past, and to that extent I do not see an issue. Why would you avoid that out of principle?

View on HN

For the same reason Richard Stallman only uses free software. Sometimes, it's good to have a moral imperative and stick to it. This is mine.

I'm far enough in my career to know that avoiding coding assistance or LLM-assisted "search" won't make my life or craft worse in any way. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Shouldn't you refuse to use anything but pencil and paper by that logic. An abacus. No not that that's technology. Only your fingers? The godhead resides equally in the pedal of a flower the gears in an engine, the human typed code on servers as well as the machine generated code on be very same servers.

There is an extreme difference between outsourcing physical difficulties to mechanical advantages, and outsourcing your brain to a large corporation that is stealing all of the IP that we have collectively created, as a society, and using it to replace our brains.

It feels clever to make comments like yours right now, but in two years when the order of control flow moves up two more steps and you are no longer needed at all, it'll be frustrating to look back and think "I wish I wouldn't have given money to them."

You might be right, as we don't know yet if these tools actually enhance or make our craft better in the long term.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com