teeeew

“I'm excited about regular people being able to automate tedious things in their lives without having to spend 6+ months learning to program first.”

Bring the implicit and explicit costs to date into your analysis and you should quickly realise none of this makes sense from a societal standpoint.

Also you seem to be living in a bubble - the average person doesn’t care about automating anything!

So… what?

With all due respect I don’t care about an acceleration in writing code - I’m more interested in incremental positive economic impact. To date I haven’t seen anything convince me that this technology will yield this.

Producing more code doesn’t overcome the lack of imagination, creativity and so on to figure out what projects resources should be invested in. This has always been an issue that will compound at firms like Google who have an expansive graveyard of projects laid to rest.

In fact, in a perverse way, all this ‘intelligence’ can exist. At the same time humans can get worse in their ability to make judgments in investment decisions.

So broadly where is the net benefit here?

That’s because you’re a subset of software engineers who know what they’re doing and cares about rigour and so on.

There’s many who’s thinking is not so deep nor sharp as yours - LLM’s are welcomed by them but come at a tremendous cost to their cognition and the firms future well-being of its code base. Because this cost is implicit and not explicit it doesn’t occur to them.

Absolutely spot on.

You are calling out the and subtle nuance that many don’t get…

In the hands of an expert… right. So is it not incredibly irresponsible to release these tools into the wild, and expose it those who are not experts? They will actually become incredibly worse off. Ironically this does not ‘democratise’ intelligence at all - the gap widens between experts and the rest.