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Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

Agreed. But to further the analogy it would be more like quitting carpentry as a career after the invention of a table saw that sometimes cuts straight lines and sometimes cuts crooked lines and sometimes just goes berserk and cuts your hand off. Even when given the exact same instructions. 🫠

I've gotten some useful summaries, snippets, and decent references from AI. It is like a slightly better Google in some cases (in other cases, worse). I worked w/a colleague a couple months back on a problem w/sorting derived, calc'd fields. We got 20 different answers in 20 prompt attempts. 🫠

None of the 20 answers provided or even led to a workable solution that covered all of our needs. We eventually had to request either a change of the specs or a change to use a SQL view vs. EF context. Our lead advised strongly against anything non-ORM. AI was less than useless in this case.

That kind of thing is why I like the power tools analogy: you need to learn a whole bunch of things to stay safe from those kinds of behaviors

It also feels like "here's a free power tool that cuts your arm off most of the time, but that's ok because there's a hugely expensive one that mostly works once you learn its quirks, and keep a surgeon nearby just in case"

What's hugely expensive though? Claude Code is $20/month and right up there with the best tools.

I believe that, but to the "hugely expensive" thing I was replying, I just don't buy it, what you can get out of the $20 plan is pretty significant, and same with the Cursor $20 plan (which I don't like but technically gives you more usage)

What frustrates me most of all is that people praising LLMs aren't transparent that this is *not* the experience you get from free ChatGPT or Gemini, or whatever. Maybe everyone is talking past each other, but IMO it's pretty basic that a tool not being free is worth being explicit about.

Yeah I have a strong theory that the (somehow huge) amount of people (on Bluesky specifically) who claim LLMs don't do anything only have experience of using the free ChatGPT 9 months ago or something.

I'll freely admit that my experience is solely with the free ChatGPT (and specifically the "stay logged out" version). I use exclusively free development tools, and I don't see why LLMs should be any different. And I don't want to deal with my interaction history becoming part of the context.