About the "Trust-Me-Bro" Culture

These posts by very senior tech leads are little more than disingenuous click bait. The real risk is obvious. In seeking to feed chum to their frenzied followers who amplify their message without knowing any better we way over promote the capabilities of a tool that we don't understand.

I think LLM assisted coding is great and I use it every day. I review the output very closely with a very skeptical eye. It is absolutely a productivity boost and definitely changes the nature of the work I do. I ask it to evaluate the merits of alternate approaches and have asked it about porting code particularly code written in python to Go and Rust.

Having said all that, I would never suggest that asking for a comparative analysis of competing alternatives was essentially the same as building those alternatives or even brainstorming those alternatives to begin with. I would also never let a research porting project on a toy ever be misinterpreted as porting all the code my team has ever written.

Here is my key takeaway from the article:

When leaders at major labs propagate these hyped-based results, it can create a “technical debt of expectations” for the rest of us. Junior developers see these viral threads and feel they are failing because they can’t reproduce a year of work in an hour, not realizing the “magic” was actually a highly-curated prototype guided by a decade of hidden expertise.

I could not agree more strongly. Will LLMs be able to port the entire Windows code base to Rust one day unsupervised? Sure, of that I have no doubt but not's suggest that day is today.