You want a screed? I’ll screed ya up good.
LLMs are bad not because of what they are, but because they’re the canary in the coalmine for modern society/capitalism/programming practices/old man shakes fist at cloud. My rant has more to do with the latter than LLMs themselves.
If I want C, Gippty gives me C++ because you can hurt yourself with raw pointers. Its ASM is almost unusable in anything memory constrained. It can’t cycle-optimize in any language if you had a gun to its CPU. It apparently doesn’t know how SIMD works. I’ve never see an algorithm from it that I didn’t have to rewrite or couldn’t have just googled for. Outside of boilerplate or the trivial case I’ve never gotten anything from it that I couldn’t have just written myself in less time than it took to prompt and then fix what it spit out. The senior DBAs at work all say that its SQL is terrifying unoptimized and would cost a golden parachute to run at scale.
Why? Because it doesn’t understand programming, it doesn’t know what code means or what it does. It’s trained on an internet full of bad advice from people that aren’t good programmers - stackoverflow, reddit, someone’s uncle’s blog. It does not problem solve, it just kluges other people’s solutions. It can’t reason about anything, it only synthesizes and regurgitates the freely available mediocrity that’s out there.
LLMs exhibit the same problems that any ‘engineer’ at a place with ping pong tables and kale wraps exhibits - they’re based on a culture where programming is a commodity and not an art or a science. It’s minimum viable product and time to market, and almost without exception it’s an embarrassing mess of slow, janky, overdone but underperforming shit. We’ve gone from putting people on the moon in ~145k LoC to websites and programs that take 30 seconds to load on hardware that’s literally 8-10 orders of magnitude more powerful. (technically not an apples-to-apples comparison, but it does underscore the scope of the issue.) And the modern world has decided that’s okay, so it keeps happening.
We’re in a Catch-22 of fancy bloated cloud-based webapps so companies complain that their hosting costs are high so you have to have ad revenue so you inject ads that further bloats the system and now you have an ecosystem where everything just gets worse and slower because you literally have to pay for your bloat. There are obvious parallels to corporations and stock markets here, which make me equally apoplectic but are left to an exercise for the reader.
You want to see the clown car driving into the dumpster fire? Node. They took the dumbest, most ass-backwards, underperformant, lower common denominator language ever conceived of and decided “sure, we can run that server-side!”, Talk about asking if we could without asking if we should.
Why did Node catch on? Because half-baked programmers from 6 week boot camps could use it. These are people that got told that the whole world is going digital and if you don’t want to wash dishes the rest of your life, you’ll plop down a bunch of money and ‘learn’ to code. Which is like saying I can teach you to make IDM tracks in 6 weeks for a bucket of cash. And some of them got jobs doing boilerplate scutwork because you’re already okay with slow, janky code and just need it to get done in time for that product launch or the Series A meeting next week.
And now the rubber meets the road - we’ve got a workforce of junior programmers that didn’t get into it because they loved it and found it fascinating and wanted to improve the world, they did it because it beats washing dishes. And you’ve got a brand new tool that can do the same thing at basically no cost - who’s the first out the door on the back of our AI overlords?
On the flip side of the coin you have collegiate programs, and honestly if it’s that or boot camps, I’d take the boot camp. College is way more expensive and it teaches you some of the most outdated concepts ever, because the people teaching you either never left the academic system or haven’t programmed professionally since COBOL was new and hot. So you get to learn C++ with SOLID and Java and UML and a bunch of other stuff that in practice just makes software slow and terrible because these guys don’t have to have performant code, that’s for you to figure out later, they just want to make sure you can count in binary. But now you can use polymorphism in a sentence, so that’s probably worth $70k, right?
Every company knows that the boot camp guys weren’t going to be the top of the heap, they were just warm bodies. But that guy’s got a degree from Purdue! Lets let him work on something important with his zero experience and outdated ideas and he’ll fit in great with the rest of the dudes that have been coasting since making senior and that’s why it takes 30 seconds before I can start typing in Excel, because fuck you Microsoft. And those shitty standards become ‘best practice’ in the workforce because they learned it in school and never bothered to question whether it was actually a good idea.
LLMs are a product of all this. The decline and commodification of software trends right along with the rise of the internet. Anything you can shove into an LLMs black box of a head is somewhere on the continuum of “about to get bad” right up to “we run Javascript on the server”. I just assume they’re going to be bad because they had a shitty teacher - us, from about 2010 to present day. I’ve never seen anything come out of them I’ve truly been impressed with and I think they gloss over important details for less experienced programmers about how code runs at a basic level which just continues to lower the bar. As the quote goes, “if AI made you a 10x programmer, you were probably working on a 0.1x problem”. And sometimes I am, but often I’m not so I don’t see the larger value, for me or for the world.
tl;dr - LLMs don’t make coders better at programming, they just easily enable crappy code to continue, and the world needs less of that.
Thanks for coming to my TURD Talk.
Q&A
Am I painting with too broad a brush? Sure. There’s plenty of great programmers out there under the age of 50, and some of them even came from boot camps. All it takes it loving it and diving into the details and understanding how things work under the hood and not settling for making something that barely functions but making something good and performant and worth the double-click. Plenty of folks out there that fit the bill, but we need more.
Am I gatekeeping? You’re damn right I am. Technology is something that should be gatekept because the quality of it actually has an impact on people’s lives, both personally day-to-day and in aggregate. And it’s something that’s measurable, quantifiable, and it’s easy to hold up a program and say “this is objectively better than this” and I think that’s important for humanity going forward if we’re going to dump all our chips in the post-capitalism tech bucket. We get it wrong at our own peril.
Am I serious about all this or just tongue-in-cheek because it beats actually doing work on a Wednesday? lil’ A, lil’ B 
