Disclaimer: I don’t have any understanding when it comes to finance/economics other than what I’ve experienced/read. However, it does seem hard to argue the fact that economics/finance are so divorced from reality that they ought to be viewed the same as the national debt.

I’m sure there are others in the same boat, but I’m still having trouble getting past the absurdity and ominous nature of everything happening in the corporate world right now. Almost every single conversation is boiled down to “just ask Claude” and it’s being used to slow down existing workflows to a comical degree. Who knows maybe this will self-correct over time, but it’s certainly a choice at the moment.

I’m not trying to be a doomer I’m really not, but these people live in a different reality than you and I. I used to listen to Ed Zitron’s podcast and tuned in to any number of his appearances on other shows to sort of shield myself from all the noise that encompasses this age of tech, but I’m slowly coming to the realization that the economics/financial picture of the situation seems entirely inconsequential. I’m hoping this is just my lack of knowledge when it comes to finance/econ, but fuck if I know. Maybe this post will make me look like a dumbass in a year or so (I hope it does).

I feel like all of us in corporate are all assets in a bet from the most evil people on the planet to see if they will be able to replace huge swaths of the population with a “good enough” solution that will slowly be de-valued and phased out of the workforce akin to IT jobs in the early/mid 2010s.

This shit really blows and I feel like LLM companies are going to come out on top, primarily because Claude has proven that it can generate passable output at lightning speed and that is more than enough to please C suites.

  • footfaults@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    3·
    24 days ago

    Like technically the code works and so the “writing the code” part goes faster but then it takes the same amount of time to review, cleanup, refactor, fix, etc as it would have to just write the code right in the first place.

    This has been my experience as well.

    Charitably, there have been moments where I have used an LLM to help debug a problem. I was using Zig and trying to decompress and deflate a ZIP archive in memory and the documentation for the APIs in Zig leaves much to be desired. I was able to post a stack trace of the crash and slowly determine a solution but at no point was it where I just let the LLM write the code. It was much more “look at the generated code, determine the change that needs to be made, and try that” with some instances being where the suggestion was completely wrong. BUT, I eventually came to the solution. I would not have been able to figure it out on my own, but it absolutely was not the case where it’s letting the LLM do it and I just review the code.

    A similar issue I had was with a crash with mariadb. New version of mariadb gets released and suddenly in development we are getting crashes right at the start of our test runs. I copy out the stack trace from mariadb and paste it into Copilot, and get a search result with some prodding, back to a bug when grant tables are disabled. It was very helpful to understand why, and our fix was to pin our mariadb version at a previous stable version

    So, really it’s only useful as a search engine. I would not use it to just generate code.