Genuinely, I am going to log off Hacker News and not come back here. Or any social media to be honest. The lot of social media is just doing nothing but raising my blood pressure, making me miserable, and making me more afraid to actually go talk about things with people in real life. And it sucks and I ought to know better at this point.
If someone ever sees me use this site again, and scrolls my profile, this is permission to bully me off of using this website :).
I said "Using LLMs makes a unmaintainable climate-destroying bug ridden slopfest."
Does an LLM make unmaintainable code? Generally, yes. Its tremendously verbose, with structures strange for humans.
Climate destroying? Depends on the LLM, but if its a US corporate based one, then yes. Just go look at the methane burners and diesel burners needed before power grid hookups years later. Climate devastation for sure.
Bug ridden? #7 on HN is "AI-Generated GitHub Copilot “Autofix” Allowed Compromise of Snowflake's Jira" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49331423
All of that defends the slur 'slopfest', which is well deserved.
Whether it's unmaintainable depends on how big it gets. That patch is 200 lines of comprehensible code, it passes. Plus what are we comparing against for maintainability and bugs? Novice code? No code at all? Treat it as a prototype for a valuable feature instead of implying it's worse than useless.
But the slopfest and verbose code is where you’re missing the bigger picture. Model written code can be understood by other models. That means future models could improve that code even more in the future.
But the biggest thing you’re missing? If that code compiles, works, and is secure? The value to people between now and a new model making it better is something gained, not lost.
Progress doesn’t happen over night. But just because it doesn’t, doesn’t mean we stop the presses and write all the books manually because we don’t have the internet yet. It means we work with what we have, derive value from it, to use that value to invest into the future.
> I didnt say "pimeys sucks".
I heard "nekusar sucks".