alt Hacker NewsRemove LLM and 80 pct of people will have to jump to start. LLM assistance is a huge dependence on something owned by few. And although I use it daily since Nov 22, I don’t see any big progress in productivity. Yes, I have done a lot of projects (that I can’t remember), I see a lot of sites made without human touch, I have heard fairy tales about llm’s breakthroughs to internet from a cage.
What I see that everybody is somehow a blacksmith now without knowing how to forge iron. And we call it progress.
I am optimistic, and I am not against LLM. I like a quote from OP’s article:
> One of my colleagues used to say, "AI is a mirror." I find that insightful: it reflects who you are, including the curiosity, judgment, and habits you bring to it. The questions you ask and the standards you apply to its answers matter.
Replies
You can't remove LLMs. Once models are released as open weights, they cannot be removed. As long as the compute to run them exists, so will LLMs.
"LLM assistance is a huge dependence on something owned by few."
Open models are capable and owned by everyone who wants to.
> Remove LLM and 80 pct of people will have to jump to start.
Isn't the same true for every service and technology we start to rely on?
Remove GPS and people will have to figure out how to read maps again.
Remove search engines and people will have to figure out how domains work.
Remove Wikipedia and we have to go back to the library to check encyclopedias.
My first project with it was in Jan 22, back when it was just sentence completion. Really hard to implement practically.
But in the past year the production boost is just insane. LLM assistance took away so many of the barriers that prevented me from executing on ideas.
I've also learned more than ever before, although it is admittedly getting harder to stay involved when the models are becoming more and more reliable.
What I have not figured out yet is why most developers around me do not share this effect. It's like it mostly works for a very specific subset of people, that do understand code, but it's not their main focus.
Just take a look at what is happening with the M-Wave FM1. Stating those devs would be lost without Ai won't stop the tide. It's not going to go away.