Stop generating, start thinking

> Generated code is rather a lot like fast fashion: it looks all right at first glance but it doesn’t hold up over time, and when you look closer it’s full of holes. Just like fast fashion, it’s often ripped off other people’s designs. And it’s a scourge on the environment. > > But there’s a key difference. Mechanisation involved replacing human effort in the manufacturing processes with machinery that could do the same job. It’s the equivalent of a codemod or a script that generates boilerplate code. The key thing is that it produces the same results each time. And if something went wrong, humans would be able to peer inside the machine and figure out what went wrong. > > LLM output is non-deterministic, and the inner workings opaque. There’s no utility in a mechanised process that spits out something different every time, often peppered with hallucinations. > LLMs are trained (without our explicit consent) on all our shitty code, and we've taught them that that's what they should be outputting. They are doomed to repeat humans’ mistakes, then be trained on the shitty reconstituted mistakes made by other LLMs in what’s (brilliantly) been called human centipede epistemology. We don't write good enough code as humans to deserve something that writes the same stuff faster. > I'm not anti-progress, I'm anti-hype. > I will continue using my spicy autocomplete, but I’m not outsourcing my thinking any time soon. Stop generating, start understanding, and remember what we enjoyed about doing this in the first place.