And when you check the work, a large portion of it was hand rolling an ORM (via an LLM). Relatively solved problem that an LLM would excel at, but also not meaningfully moving the needle when you could use an existing library. And likely just creating more debt down the road.
If you’ve been around the block and are judicious how you use them, LLM’s are a really amazing productivity boost. For those without that judgement and taste, I’m seeing footguns proliferate and the LLM’s are not warning them when someone steps on the pressure plate that’s about to blow off their foot. I’m hopeful we will this year create better context window-based or recursive guardrails for the coding agents to solve for this.
LLMs accelerate this and make it more visible, but they are not the cause. It is almost always a person trying to solve a problem and just not knowing what they don't know because they are learning as they go.
Lol, who doesn't hate that?
But don't worry, those days are over, the LLMs it is never going to push back on your ideas.
But it's definitely the case that being able to go back and forth quickly with an LLM digging into my exact context, rather than dealing with the kind of judgy humorless attitude that was dominant on SO is hugely refreshing and way more productive!
Isn't that what "using an LLM" is supposed to solve in the first place?
2. LLMs are obsequious
3. Even if LLMs have access to a lot of knowledge they are very bad at contextualizing it and applying it practically
I'm sure you can think of many other reasons as well.
People who are driven to learn new things and to do things are going to use whatever is available to them in order to do it. They are going to get into trouble doing that more often than not, but they aren't going to stop. No is helping the situation by sneering at them -- they are used it to it, anyway.
I often have one agent/prompt where I build things but then I have another agent/prompt where their only job is to find codesmells, bad patterns, outdated libraries, and make issues or fix these problems.
In this regard, I see LLM's as a way for us to way more efficiently encode, compress, convey and enable operational practice our combined learned experiences. What will be really exciting is watching what happens as LLM's simultaneously draw from and contribute to those learned experiences as we do; we don't need full AGI to sharply realize massive benefits from just rapidly, recursively enabling a new highly dynamic form of our knowledge sphere that drastically shortens the distance from knowledge to deeply-nuanced praxis.
There is probably some effective way to put this direction into the claude.md, but so far it still seems to do unnecessary reimplementation quite a lot.
And of course the open source ones get abandoned pretty regularly. Type ORM, which a 3rd party vendor used on an app we farmed out to them, mutates/garbles your input array on a multi-line insert. That was a fun one to debug. The issue has been open forever and no one cares. https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm/issues/9058
So yeah, if I ever need an ORM again, I'm probably rolling my own.
*(I know you weren't complaining about the idea of rolling your own ORM, I just wanted to vent about Type ORM. Thanks for listening.)
Why use a 3rd party dependency that might have features you don't need when you can write a hyper-specific solution in a day with an LLM and then you control the full codebase.
Or why pay €€€ for a SaaS every month when you can replicate the relevant bits yourself?
We should not exeggarate the capabilities of LLMs, sure, but let's also not play "don't look up".
In the most inflationary era of capabilities we've seen yet, it could be the right move. What's debt when in a matter of months you'll be able to clear it in one shot?