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Comment by hungryhobbit | Hacker News Reader

I remember when my dev team included some people using Emacs, some using Eclipse (this was pre-VS Code), and some using IntelliJ.

Developers will always disagree on the best tool for X ... but we should all fear the Luddites who refuse to even try new tools, like AI. That personality type doesn't at all mesh with my idea of a "good programmer".

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I will try anything reasonable. And have tried LLM tools for programming. But there's no way I would use it daily. It's too inefficient, too error prone, and will actively make me a worse programmer (as I will be writing less code and making fewer decisions. I will also understand less of the systems I'm building).

All the excellent developers around me are _not_ using AI except for very small, contained tasks.

Are you implying that someone who prefers Eclipse is more likely to be a good software engineer than someone who prefers Emacs? If so, that is so hilariously backwards that I can't even begin to understand the types of experiences that you must've had.

I am sure that you're objectively wrong if that is what you're saying.

I'm reading it as: those unwilling to try both and make an honest evaluation and instead have preconceived notions and bigotry tend to make bad programmers. That preferences are fine, but dogmatism should be avoided.

Nowadays most people try VSCode or JetBrains "by default" in school or at a first job. It's Emacs that's for explorers who actually try alternatives

I went to a James Gosling talk where he excoriated the Emacs users in his audience for clinging to outdated technology and not using a state-of-the-art IDE.

But the IDE he was hawking wasn't Eclipse. I think it was Sun Studio.

Flat out wrong. The most impressive engineers I've met in my career did not care for fancy tools with bells and whistles.

Sure, I bet they didn't outright dismiss them as useless to the entire field though! I'm sure they still understood the value those fancy tools provided to their peers.

Unless someone is trolling, it’s rare for people to deem it as “useless”. Most counterpoints have been about ethics and issues that surround LLM usage. Things like licensing, coding vs review time, correctness and maintainability of the generated code, etc… Unless you believe we’re in a software engineering utopia, I think it’s fair to call those out.

I think it’s fair to call those things out 100% of the time regardless of the LLM usage. Not sure what gave you the impression otherwise.

a sculptor or a painter are doing something inherently different from someone who describes the outcome and have it created by someone else.

in my world they are called product managers or product owners (scrum) but they are not programmers. prompting an LLM is producing a product but it is not programming.

i refuse to use AI because i want to remain a programmer, and not become a manager.

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