I don't mind it so much when it's a newbie or non-techie who has never actually written code before, because bless their hearts, they did it! They got some code working!

But if you've been developing for decades, you know that counting lines of code means nothing, less than nothing. That you could probably achieve the same result in half the lines if you thought about it a bit longer.

And to claim this as an achievement when it's LLM-generated... that's not a boast. That doesn't mean what you think it means.

But I guess we hit the same old problem that we've always had - how do you measure productivity in software development? If you wanted to boast about how an LLM is making you 100x more productive, what metric could you use? LOC is the most easily measurable, really, really, terrible measure that PMs have been using since we started doing this, because everything else is hard.

Sandi Metz https://sandimetz.com/blog/2016/1/20/the-wrong-abstraction

I found the same thing when working in Cambodia; Khmer culture is very, very, family-oriented, the extended family is the main survival mechanism for Khmer people, and individual wishes are often subordinated to the family. This is their culture, Khmer people are happy with it, this is how they choose to live. The Anglo ex-pats (including me) don't understand it, find it oppressive and have a natural instinct to "liberate" Khmer people from this oppression. Took me quite a while of talking with Khmer people to realise that they look at the world very differently from me, and from that perspective this all works and is a source of joy and comfort for them. Obviously there are outliers and people who this doesn't work for, but that's also true of Anglo culture.

I get that if you get a problem then it'll take a bit of work to fix, but all of this seems like a lot less work than dealing with support for a platform you don't control.

It's similar with food: our Wheatbelt produces vast amounts of wheat. Which is great but kinda useless without global trade; we can't turn all that wheat into actual food ourselves.

I can easily see the advantage, even now, of running the LLM locally. As others have said in this topic. I think it'll happen.

edit: thanks for clarifying :)

When I was a kid, Detroit was a symbol of US industry and engineering. All those huge muscle cars. That kind of Mad Max Road Warrior attitude (yeah, I know that's Aussie, but that same attitude).

Now it's a symbol of US decline, I think. It's strange to me that the USA let this happen, or that it didn't have the power to stop it happening.

It would be like the UK allowing Oxford or Cambridge to become a slum, the universities moving away and the old buildings becoming derelict. Or the Sydney Opera House going vacant and letting squatters move in.

There's something very, very symbolic about Detroit, then and now.

Just my opinion. Apologies if it offends, that is not my intent.

I can totally see the same happening here; on-device LLMs are a toy, and then they eat the world and everyone has their own personal LLM running on their own device and the cloud LLMs are a niche used by large institutions.

I think this is symptomatic of humans - our comfort zone is the "7 out of 10" morass of similarity and blandness. We are herd animals. LLMs are just reflecting this.

And I don't think our tendency to herd will allow us to select the quirky outliers even if that's the only distinguishing characteristic of non-LLM output.

And Opus is absolutely terrible at guessing how many tokens it's used. Having that as a number that the model can access itself would be a real boon.

If you buy something, do nothing with it, and then sell it for a profit, we should tax that profit at 90% ish.

The founder of FedEx got low on cash. So he took all the remaining cash (including what he owed in payroll) to Vegas and gambled it. And won, and paid his staff, and the rest is history.

We were taught that this was a great example of "entrepreneurial hustle". I was horrified.

How many founders copied this lesson? How many employees couldn't pay their mortgages because the CEO had learned the wrong lesson from this story?

This kind of nightmare irresponsibility needs to be punished, not glorified.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx_Express: "However, the company began to experience financial difficulties, losing up to a million USD a month. While waiting for a flight home to Memphis from Chicago after being turned down for capital by General Dynamics, Smith impulsively hopped on a flight to Las Vegas, where he won $27,000 playing blackjack. The winnings enabled the cash-strapped company to meet payroll the following Monday. "

A contract is an entrance ticket to a court case. If you can't afford to fight the court case, the contract isn't much use. If the other party aren't in a jurisdiction that the court can enforce in, the contract isn't much use. If the other party can just vanish and when you try to take them to court, the contract isn't much use.

A contract doesn't stop other people from doing things (or make them do things that they would otherwise not do). It just specifies that if they do those things (or don't do them) then you can take them to court. You still need to be able to take them to court for any of this to work.

Contracts aren't toilet paper. But they also aren't the magic solution to all problems that they are sometimes held up to be.