Absolutely. When used correctly, it can become a tool for pulling our minds out of the gutter of pedantic pocket lint and distracting ephemera and keep it in a space where it is intellectually rewarding and fruitful. It can help you grasp a code base more quickly. It can help you debug things more effectively. But that's up to how you use it.
If all you do is point your LLM at your Jira tickets, then you are failing to be an engineer. I mean, if that's all you are doing, then who needs you? One of the most important things to learn is what the right questions to ask are and what the right decisions to make are when guiding the LLM, as well as the ability to judge the output it produces.
I agree that any sufficiently complex human operation - whether industrial or scientific or whatever - requires a culture and a living tradition that develops over time and communicates knowledge and understanding across generations. In fact, many problems in our culture can be attributed to a contempt for tradition that developed. (It is true that tradition can ossify. That's can be a problem with attitudes toward tradition rather than tradition itself, or a sign that something needs to be addressed. A good tradition is a dialogue spanning history.)
However, it is also true that technology develops and produces changes that in the short term cause pain, but in the long term produce a better outcome in some desirable sense. Coding is not an end in itself. Just as switchboard operators and human computers are obsolete, because the conditions that caused the need for them ceased to exist, it may be the case that a certain manual style of programming is also becoming obsolete.
You can imagine human computers decades ago thinking that computing technology is bad, because people will loose numerical facility. But this misunderstands the structure of the value of practical skills and the difference between knowledge of principles and practical skill. Sure, few if any people today can perform numerical computation as quickly and competently in their heads or on paper as human computers, but...
1. that's different from understanding the principles of computation which is closer to a theoretical grasp and has eternal or at least lasting value
2. the value of the practical numerical facility was rooted in the need for obtaining results as quickly as possible, and that particular set of techniques or skills is no longer practical
Perhaps manual coding is like that. I don't know why people are surprised. Generative programming has always been a desired end in CS for along time. CS grads can still and should still learn the principles of their field and learn them well, but the profile of practical industrial techniques and needed skills is changing. As software eats more and more of the world, it is becoming increasingly impractical for manually fiddling with silly bits of plumbing. We obviously haven't been able to develop abstractions well enough to avoid it, and part of the reason is that appetite comes with eating. Once you make something easier, it makes it easier to achieve even greater things more easily...hence new plumbing and implementation complexity.
Let's be honest here. Much of programming is intellectually dull. It's is plumbing. It's not algorithmically interesting. It's not interesting from a modeling perspective. It's not interesting conceptually. It's not interesting as a matter of system design. Most programming out in the wild is the same old crap being recapitulated a million times over. If all you want is to become skilled in doing the same thing over and over again, then I can understand why you might find LLMs threatening. Your market value as a maker of yet-another-flask-web-app has plummeted hard. People who enjoy that kind of programming are generally not very intellectually motivated people - at least not where programming is concerned - and likely prefer the tedious comforts of rehearsed ephemeral detail. LLMs can keep us from rabbit holing and focused on the domain.
In any case, I don't think LLMs are a threat to the field per se. I just think that the skill set is shifting and developing. I think we are still figuring out what it means to develop the right understanding and intuitions to develop software without the benefit of having had done it manually. Time will tell. However, I also think being able to read code has become relatively more important than writing it. When you have to verify the quality of LLM-generated code and put your name behind it, you have to be able to understand it, and that's a somewhat neglected skill in my view. Programming very often prefer to write code than to read it. LLMs might be just the thing to coerce an improvement in the latter sort of literacy. With this also comes a greater importance of formal specification. That's where I would expect the future of the field to shift.
Have you ever reflected on the legitimacy of your sentinents? As in, you find “terrifying” that people find factory farming bad, but choose to consume its products anyway. But have you considered that perhaps the moral severity that is causing your reaction of horror is actually miscalibrated and unwarranted?
Poverty sucks, but if you think material wealth is sufficient for or even the key to happiness, then you've already lost the plot.
The key is virtue. Ethics is the science of the good. You cannot be happy as an immoral person. That's where you should look for sources of misery or unhappiness.
(We could also distinguish between happiness and joy, where, according to this distinction, happiness fluctuates because it is dependent on circumstance, while joy is grounded in permanence.)
Political and economic orders or systems matter, of course, but ultimately, even good ones fail, because ultimately all political/social/economic orders depend on the quality of their participants. No system can neutralize the effects of human vice and stupidity as such, because every system is the product of the actions of those very same people.
If capitalism is about meeting market demands apart from any objective sense of quality, then yes. It's basically curve fitting.
The reason things are shittier is because the market is shittier. Consumer demands shape what companies make and sell. If companies can get away with selling garbage, because the market is undiscerning, then they will make garbage.
It's the same with politics. Ultimately, the quality of a political culture is determined by its participants.
The real problem isn't capitalism, but consumerism, which, among other defects, prioritizes the maximization of quantity over quality.
That depends what you include under the definition of "capitalism". I think a minimal definition - private property, profit motive, market exchange - doesn't necessarily entail consumerism. You need to include additional factors like the cultural/moral context and the political order. Liberalism + capitalism can easily degenerate into consumerism, because the state here takes a permissive moral stance toward vice.
In any case, no one is inducing new basic appetites into the market, but seizing on (often through deception and manipulation) existing appetites. "Keeping up with the Joneses", for example, exploits envy and other covetous vices in the populace. Indulging vices naturally feeds those vices which can entrench a culture that normalizes them.
Not just Japan. Stats are pretty miserable across the developed world.
The main reason for demographic decline and low fertility is liberal consumerism. Liberal consumerism is the religion of the developed world, and like all religions, it is a worldview that shapes one's understanding of what life is about. Consumerism's implicit anthropology is hostile to fertility, because fertility is at odds with the consumerist imperative. It also shapes how people view relationships and society. Consumerism is totalizing and produces a culture that smothers everything in the logic of consumerism.
Immigration is just an extractive and parasitic bandage over a gangrenous limb. The solution is to destroy consumerism and replaced with something better and more human. This will happen sooner or later, as consumerist societies will be eradicated through selective pressure (they'll go extinct), but it is better to voluntarily wage a religious, cultural, and political war against consumerism to save these societies.
I don't think exceptions or confined bad side effects make for very good arguments against general policy. You wouldn't ban planes, because sometimes they crash. This isn't math. We're not proving that a rule holds for every element of the domain.
.. unless you're the person to whom the side effects are happening. How many citizens is it acceptable to wrongly deport or debank, potentially without trial?
If all you do is point your LLM at your Jira tickets, then you are failing to be an engineer. I mean, if that's all you are doing, then who needs you? One of the most important things to learn is what the right questions to ask are and what the right decisions to make are when guiding the LLM, as well as the ability to judge the output it produces.
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