by rewgs | 2025-12-27 06:09:27+00:00
To expand on this:

LLMs are indeed currently an iterative improvement. I've found a few good use-cases for them. They're not nothing.

But at the moment, they are nowhere near the "massive productivity multiplier" they're advertised to be. Just as adding more lanes doesn't make traffic any better, perhaps they never will.

Or perhaps all the promises will come true -- and that, of course, is what is actually meant when the productivity gains are screamed from the rooftops. It was the same with computers, and it was the same with the internet: the proposed massive changes were going to come at some vague point in the future. Plenty of people saw those changes coming even decades in advance; reason from first principles and extrapolate the results of x scale and y investment and you couldn't not see where it was headed, at least generally.

The future potential is being sold in much the same way here. That'd be all fine and good except for the fact that the capex required to bring this potential future into being compared to any conceivable revenue model is so completely absurd that, even putting aside the disruptive-at-best nature of the technology, making up for the literal trillions of dollars of investment will have to twist our economic model to the point of breaking in order to make the math math. Add in the fact that this technology is tailor-made to not just disrupt or transform our jobs but to replace workers should this future potential arrive, and suddenly it looks nothing like computers in the 70s or networks in the 80s. It's not wonder not everyone is excited about it -- the dynamic is, at its very core, adversarial; its very existence states the quiet part of class warfare out loud.

Which brings us to so many people being forced to use it. I really, really hate this. Just as I don't want to be told which editor/IDE to use, I don't want to be told how to program. I deeply care about and understand my workflow quite well, thank you very much -- I've been diligently working on refining it for a good while now. And to state the obvious: if it were as good as they say it is, I'd be using it the way they want me to. I don't, because they just aren't that good (thankfully I have a choice in this matter -- for now). I also just don't like using them while programming, as I find them noisy and oddly extraverting, which tires me out. They are antithetical to flow. No one ever got into a flow state while pair programming, or managing a junior developer, and I doubt anyone ever got into a flow state while chatting with an LLM. It's just the wrong interface. The "better autocomplete" model is a better interface, but in practice I just haven't seen it do better than a good LSP or my own brain. At best it saves me a few key strokes, which I'd hardly call revolutionary. Again, not nothing, but far from the promise. We're still a very long way off.

To get there, LLM developers need cash, and they need data. Companies are forcing LLMs into every nook and cranny of so many employees' workflows so that they can provide training data, and bring that potential future one step closer to reality. The more we use LLMs, the more likely we are to being replaced. Simple as that.

I for one would welcome our new robot overlords if I had any faith that our society could navigate this disruption with grace and humanity. I'd be ecstatic and totally bullish on the tech if I felt it were ushering in a Star Trek-like future. But, ha, nope -- any faith I had in that sort of response died with how so many handled Covid, and especially when Trump was elected for a second time. These two events destroyed my estimation of humanity as a cooperative organism.

No, I now expect humanity at large -- or at least the USA -- to look at the stupidest, most short-sighted, meanest option possible and enthusiastically say "let's do that!" Which, coincidentally, is another way of describing what is currently happening with LLMs: the act of forcing mediocre tools down our throats while cynically exploiting our "language = intelligence" psychological blind-spot, raising utilities prices (how is a company's electric bill my problem again?), killing personal computing, accelerating climate change at the worst possible time, all in the name of destroying both my vocation and avocation.