My friend who can't code is now the resident "programmer" on his team. He just uses ChatGPT behind the scenes. That writ large is going to make us tech people all care, one way or another :/
I had a colleague in the UK in 2006 who just sat and played games on his phone all day and outsourced his desktop to a buddy in the Czech Republic for about 25% of his income. C'est la vie!
But this has always been a thing. The last startup I worked at, some of the engineers would copy/paste a ton of code from StackOverflow and barely understood what was going on.
I can absolutely, 100% guarantee, that there is code out there that if you consulted for might kill someone of a weaker constitution written by 100% organic humans. While LLM-generated code is likely to be various degrees of messy or incorrect, it's likely to be, on average, higher quality than code running critical systems RIGHT NOW and have been doing so for a decade or more. Heck, very recently I refactored code written by interns that was worse than something that would have come out of an LLM. (my work blocks them, so this was all coming from the interns) I'm not out here preaching how amazing LLMs are or anything (though it does help me enjoy writing little side projects by avoiding hours of researching how to do things), but we need to make sure we are very aware of what has, and is being, written by actual humans. And how many times someone has installed Excel on a server so they could open a spreadsheet to run a calculation in that spreadsheet before reading the result out of it. (https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Excellent-Design)
Yeah it doesn’t take much to impress people who don’t know how to program. That’s the thing with all these little toy apps like the ones in the article — if you have no to minimal programming skills this stuff looks like Claude is performing miracles. To everyone else, we’re wondering why something as trivial as an “HTML entity escaper” (yes, that one of the “apps”) requires multiple follow up prompts due to undefined references and the like.
While your comment is much more antagonistic and demeaning than I like to see on the posts of folks who are sharing their experiences or pet-projects, I do agree with the sentiment; I guess our definition on non-trivial is significantly different from others’ definitions.
