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Comment by winrid | Hacker News Reader

They're not dumb. They just don't care. They didn't before either. Now they just have an easy excuse.

Completely wrong generalization.

I'm a person who is over-reliant on LLMs, doesn't know how most of the things in the codebase work, and is atrophying both in programming and in general cognition.

I used to care, a lot. And I still do.

If you actually cared. You’d do something about it.

Tell us more about how you caring a lot matches up with this self diagnosis.

Are you prioritizing other things? Do you think losing your cognition and programming skills won't have a negative effect on your project?

Those seem bad but maybe they fit into a bigger picture for you?

I don't want to speak for them, but perhaps this is a very real consequence of the "use ai or get left behind" talking point. Maybe they were effectively scared into it, and now are too far gone. They seem like a very reasonable person if they're admitting to being over reliant on LLMs, so I don't mean this as an insult

What are you trying to do to halt that atrophy, then?

Nope you just don't care to know. Stop making excuses.

They cared enough to do good work before, so I don't think that your explanation suffices here. From my observation (not just with their programming but in other interactions), it truly is that using an LLM has made these people less intelligent than they were before.

There was an increasingly scary mass of people in the industry that viewed the coding as a sort of therapeutic exercise, and would become quite obsessive about it. For those people LLMs are anathema because they take away what was the rewarding part of the job.

If you care primarily about the quality of the end result, as opposed to being attached to a particular process of achieving it, then you're happy about how things have gone.

You find it scary that people enjoy what they do? Simply caring about the end result is often not wise, ethical, or sustainable, and the quality thereof is dubious in any case, especially when you consider that the end result of developing software is never just the artifact.

Treating coding as the therapeutic reward for other things (typically tolerating bureaucracy) and then indulging obsessions about it absolutely is unhealthy.

And I've seen exactly this across multiple large and small organizations in multiple countries, in addition to being all over here and the red site.

This is quite distinct from enjoyment.

People who simply enjoy coding (without treating it to be "therapeutic") are still unhappy because working with LLMs is just not the same, and not rewarding in the same way

> Treating coding as the therapeutic reward for other things (typically tolerating bureaucracy) and then indulging obsessions about it absolutely is unhealthy.

> And I've seen exactly this across multiple large and small organizations in multiple countries, in addition to being all over here and the red site.

I know that experience, but I do have a different opinion on this:

Many such people studied computer science (a similar point holds for mathematics, physics and some engineering disciplines) because they love coding.

Unluckily, the job that they got does involve barely any clever coding, but rather

- tolerating and gluing together shitty code pieces that someone else wrote

- tolerating red tape

So, such people simply do in their free time what they love. And to come back to my point "similar point holds for mathematics, physics and some engineering disciplines": these people try to use their little free time to prove some novel theorems or put their shed full of machines like 3D printers, CNC mills, CNC lathes, laser cutters, self-built pick-and-place machines, ... to work on their own beloved engineering projects.

> If you care primarily about the quality of the end result, as opposed to being attached to a particular process of achieving it, then you're happy about how things have gone.

We must be living on different planets, because from everything I can see, software quality is at a historic low.

A friend of mine, really nice guy, is training as a lawyer at the moment. He has zero interest in law or justice, but heard that lawyers make a lot of money. Not too long about, programming went through a very similar phase. To be clear its not that I think programmers or lawyers shouldn't make good money, they absolutely should and it is deserved, its just it has the unfortunate side effect of attracting people who don't care about the field itself. For those people, they care as little as they can get away with and still be paid big money, and if LLM's allow them to do that at the cost of quality, they absolutely will.

I do think LLM's are making some genuine programmers less intelligent, but I think this type of person makes up a decent portion of its users too

> really nice guy, is training as a lawyer at the moment. He has zero interest in law or justice, but heard that lawyers make a lot of money.

Sorry to say this, but he doesn't sound like a nice guy.

I can say with a great degree of certainty that I know him better than you would from half a paragraph. Would you like to think that someone would judge your character from so little?

I would not study law with no interest in justice, being motivated by megabucks. This is sociopathic.

People judge me for less all the time and I usually don't care.

I don't think my friend is a sociopath. Perhaps 0 interest in justice is an exaggeration, or a matter of perspective, more like an average interest in it. At the end of the day, he took a career path for the same reason most people do. I can see why if you're deeply passionate about your field that can be annoying, but "sociopath" is really quite an extreme judgement

> People judge me for less all the time and I usually don't care.

Maybe its a case of "takes one to know one", but isn't this literally what a sociopath is? You act without caring what people think. I don't usually like to say that about a person I don't know but clearly you won't be affected by that.

> isn't this literally what a sociopath is? You act without caring what people think.

I don't care when people are wrong about me and my moral compass is telling me what is right. My moral compass is mostly centered around love and respect for others. If someone misunderstands that about me, they are within their rights to do so.

I have love and respect for your friend even though we've never met and you've given me full indication he is a money grubbing sociopath. And for you, who doubles down into saying your description is not sociopathic.

Well you clearly do care about my judgement in this circumstance, perhaps that tells you something? Wanting to respect others and yet jumping to bad faith conclusions about people you know nothing about besides a line of text doesn't line up, and clearly you know that.

If everything you're saying is true, your moral compass is clearly not aligning with your actions here. That's fine, genuinely wanting to love and respect others and making a mistake in your actions on that moral compass is a one time mistake that can be easily remedied. The alternative is that you're actions align, the mistake was your conception of your moral compass, which would be a far bigger problem.

I'm not dumb. I care a great deal and I always have. I've just never been good at programming.

When I recently found a small bug in how NTP is implemented in Home Assistant OS that was affecting my use of it, I thought about just reporting that bug.

But I set the bot forth to work on corrective measures, instead.

The first proposed fixes were overbearing and awful. Maybe they'd have worked but it hurt my soul to look at them. I couldn't accept them -- not for my system at home nor for anyone else's.

Through a laborious process (that many here could have skipped entirely), I eventually got what I feel is a cromulent fix down to a few lines of changes in an init script.

I didn't write it. All I did was direct (and sometimes brow-beat) the bot, rejecting things over and over while optimizing at a high level until it produced an acceptable result.

I now have a fix that is tidy-enough that it can be applied to running systems. It is easy to understand what it does, and why it does it -- even for me. Perhaps I should submit a PR...

> They just don't care. They didn't before either.

...but this kind of blanket mentality really puts a damper on my willingness to do so.

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