by 20k | 2025-06-03 07:07:48+00:00
>All progress on LLMs could halt today, and LLMs would remain the 2nd most important thing to happen over the course of my career.

During my time as a programmer (gaming + astrophysics), the following things have happened:

1. The rise of GPGPU programming, which has enabled 1000x increases in performance

2. A revolution in CPU architecture, from single core, to massively multicore

3. C++98 - C++26

4. Transformational increases in CPU memory

5. (In the graphics space): dedicated raytracing hardware, the fully general purpose GPU + OpenCL/CUDA, deferred rendering, FSR/DLSS

6. Mobile phones were invented

7. 64-bit

8. The internet went from being for MSN and facebook to what it is today

9. The rise of Valve/Steam and the incredible transformational existence of the indie games market, which enables individuals to self publish their code and products for virtually nothing

10. Clang was born, and GCC came back to life. MSVC became standards compliant, finally

11. Rust was invented, and is taking off. People actually take security seriously now (!)

12. Unified CPU/GPU memory spaces, GPU architectures becoming scalar etc

All of these have had vastly more impact on my programming than LLM's ever had. I've always a bit wondered who people are who find it transformational, because I can vaguely gesture at any part of my programming tooling and find that its vastly different to 10 years ago

>interact with Git, run existing tooling, like linters, formatters, and model checkers, and make essentially arbitrary tool calls (that you set up) through MCP.

I mean.. you can just do all these things anyway. Its literally more work for me to use an LLM to run a linter than to run a linter (its built into my IDE). So's git. And formatters as well. You can also make arbitrary tool calls.. through your ide/scripts/precommit/postcommit/etc. I have no idea why you'd even want an LLM to do this!

>People complain about LLM-generated code being “probabilistic”. No it isn’t

>The LLM might be stochastic

????????? That's literally the entire point. I want deterministic answers, like clang based autocomplete instead of the nightmare that is prob- i mean stochastic autocomplete

>If hallucination matters to you, your programming language has let you down.

They matter beacuse they waste your time with bullshit that you then have to fix. No programming language can truly enforce correct logic constraints which are one of the primary difficulties with writing code. I literally have no idea what the OP is even doing, actually writing code has always been a vastly minimal amount of time - the main bottleneck is the train of thought to make sure that everything's correct. The literal typing is an afterthought. No programming language can bypass that step, they can (at best) handhold you through certain kinds of problems

>Does an intern cost $20/month? Because that’s what Cursor.ai costs.

For the moment. They'll jack up the prices while enshittifying, and then good luck. I do not want to subscribe to a service to be able to code. I use free IDEs and free tools for exactly this reason. If you rely on a paid-for 3rd party you are doing it wrong and will regret it. This is one of the silliest things in the whole article

>But people select languages in part based on how well LLMs work with them, so Rust people should get on that

They really don't. People select languages based on:

1. What they're taught at school/university

2. What language meets their domain requirements

3. What language their job requires

>Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.

Are you joking. Is this article a troll? Programmers give a lot of a crap about copyright law. GPL/MIT/etc are hugely important, and people respect the ever loving crap about it in general - even most major companies won't just blatantly pirate GPL works

There's a tonne more in this article, but it smells like someone who has literally no idea what they're talking about talking out of their arse, and it shows profoundly