Anti-LLM Sentiment Considered Harmful

Anti-AI, Pro-AI both have their pros and cons. We are all entitled to whatever opinion we choose to carry.

I personally think AI has value like any other tool that has come before it. Sure, AI is different in that it is an attempt at automating intelligence or something along those lines, but once you look beyond the marketing and the hype, it just seems like another way of writing code. As such, it’s only going to be as good as the person using it and their familiarity with it. That is to say, sure, AI makes it easier to produce slop, but it can also make it easier to produce high quality code too (i.e Ghostty).

From that perspective, perhaps it’s more productive to not treat AI generated code as slop outright but call out bad code as bad and good code as good regardless of whether it’s hand written or AI written.

As for AI and the Haskell community, I don’t think LLMs are going to magically improve things. Sure, they may help, but what we have with Haskell is, IMO, a people/branding problem (feel free to correct me if I am wrong). I mean, there are still people out there who consider Haskell a purely academic language of no practical use. Those people aren’t going to want to write Haskell, LLM sentiments aside. We need more people to first have an interest in the language and want to use it. LLMs may help or hinder us beyond that point but we need to get there first.

For those already in the community, I don’t particularly see the issue with using an LLM to patch stuff up (code, docs, etc…), again, so long as, it is of high/decent quality.

As for the volume problem, well, that’s not unique to us. We all, as an industry, need to work together to sort that one out, I think.

My two cents