Some people are actually interested in programming, coming and bleating about LLMs making all the finer points of it unimportant is as clueless as a manager coming here and telling us that syntax is unimportant because he has programmers for that crap.
If you don't care, don't go around in programming threads telling you how it doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't matter to you, because you prefer to be ignorant about the details of programming, and you have found tools that let you live in ignorance, good for you. But some of us do care, and are going to continue to do so.
My point isn't that what you are doing is pointless or that you shouldn't enjoy what you do but that it ultimately holds very little economic value especially as someone in charge of hiring developers, their experience is more valuable in the sphere of architectural design than expertise over syntax.
LLMs compile english to whatever code you want and it can write it better, faster and more efficiently than a human can over the long run. You might have an edge in shorter sprints but that gap is quickly reduced when LLMs simply learn and apply whatever optimization they find and it can continue to output without any diminishing returns and at fraction of what it takes to pay a human to do it.
With LLMs you pay per token, so if you can express the same code in 1 / 10th the tokens that absolutely matters. Moreover they have a finite context window, so more concise syntax can make that more economical.
Sure but how many devs can sustain that level of efficiency around the clock and how much thought do you think their employers will give when the LLM tokens pay 1/100~1/1000th of the wage paid
I want code that is efficient, secure and cheap to produce. There is no way a human can compete with a network of agents doing that. Whatever edge you think exists is on a downward trend. Look at where we were in the days of GPT 4o vs now in terms of coding capability. Look at the marketplace for overseas contractors and the impact AI has had.
To ship what I do now would've cost a few million dollars per year in terms of the team needed to maintain it now its 1000x cheaper
I'm not making that argument are you responding to the right person?
My argument was that syntax still matters because LLMs communicate in syntax, and they pay for that per token, therefore LLMs make syntax more relevent as you can actually calculate cost to write in one language versus another.
I'm not arguing that humans can compete with a network of agents.
Comments
with LLMs? syntax doesn't really matter anymore exactly because of what you mentioned in your last sentence.
Some people are actually interested in programming, coming and bleating about LLMs making all the finer points of it unimportant is as clueless as a manager coming here and telling us that syntax is unimportant because he has programmers for that crap.
If you don't care, don't go around in programming threads telling you how it doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't matter to you, because you prefer to be ignorant about the details of programming, and you have found tools that let you live in ignorance, good for you. But some of us do care, and are going to continue to do so.
My point isn't that what you are doing is pointless or that you shouldn't enjoy what you do but that it ultimately holds very little economic value especially as someone in charge of hiring developers, their experience is more valuable in the sphere of architectural design than expertise over syntax.
LLMs compile english to whatever code you want and it can write it better, faster and more efficiently than a human can over the long run. You might have an edge in shorter sprints but that gap is quickly reduced when LLMs simply learn and apply whatever optimization they find and it can continue to output without any diminishing returns and at fraction of what it takes to pay a human to do it.
If you do not even read code (the fact that you don't write any is clear), then what do you do?
With LLMs you pay per token, so if you can express the same code in 1 / 10th the tokens that absolutely matters. Moreover they have a finite context window, so more concise syntax can make that more economical.
Sure but how many devs can sustain that level of efficiency around the clock and how much thought do you think their employers will give when the LLM tokens pay 1/100~1/1000th of the wage paid
Wdym, the LLM is writing it either way? My point is all else being equal, you’d prefer the code that’s shorter for the reasons stated.
I want code that is efficient, secure and cheap to produce. There is no way a human can compete with a network of agents doing that. Whatever edge you think exists is on a downward trend. Look at where we were in the days of GPT 4o vs now in terms of coding capability. Look at the marketplace for overseas contractors and the impact AI has had.
To ship what I do now would've cost a few million dollars per year in terms of the team needed to maintain it now its 1000x cheaper
I'm not making that argument are you responding to the right person?
My argument was that syntax still matters because LLMs communicate in syntax, and they pay for that per token, therefore LLMs make syntax more relevent as you can actually calculate cost to write in one language versus another.
I'm not arguing that humans can compete with a network of agents.
It does if you actually want to understand what the slop-bot is doing.