I really enjoy building tooling around LLMs. It’s so fun and watching myself get better results is great. And yet the companies providing the LLMs have trained them in unethical ways and power them in unethical ways. They didn’t build tools to boost us, they built them to replace us. And now we have to get on board, or… well I don’t know.

And so there’s a duality to me where I play with them, while speaking out against them. I’m a semi-advanced user. I also wish that companies would all turn around and say no.

The job that I enjoyed and am used to feels unobtainable now. And I need to think about what I’ll actually enjoy in this new world. It could be product engineering and would be a good fit for me.

I’m ill and being melodramatic, aren’t I? 😂

@rachel ill, but I’m not convinced of melodramatic. I’m having similar thoughts of late, I often wish I could be one of the “ugh, it doesn’t work and nobody asked for it” people because it seems much easier than being a “it works really well, can be useful tool, but using it requires funding some of the worst people around” person. Also as you mention, spending all day doing code review for a machine just isn’t as fun as sitting down and thinking hard about how to do things.

@rachel this immediately brought to mind Warhammer 40,000 with its tech priests who worship the machine god.

Not reviewing the code seems even worse than being stuck doing so, because the next step is writing endless spec documents that have to be reviewed to make sure everything has been covered to a degree the machine can’t possibly miss implementing it.

@jon that does seem like a potential and rather tedious outcome. However a product manager can back and forth on an implementation on pen and paper, or rapid development. So too can an agent. I am sure we'll develop systems to help with this. And of course it is going to differ project to project, and on the size of the codebase. I wonder if micro-services will make more sense again vs monoliths for small teams.

@jon btw I have been playing with Cucumber again, so there is a spec that describes how a user interacts, and it can't go out of sync because it is the tests.

@jon I have been running an experiment where I lean in on DHHs rails world keynote and see what it would take for me to be happy merging LLM code without reviewing it. It changes the way you think about it.

* I am not merging code anywhere important in this experiment.