I recently (finally) joined a software company. Hooray! I would like to document the shift from academia to industry sometime down the line. I’ll wait at least till the probation period ends Xp.

I’ve have a little (okay maybe not little) aversion to using LLMs at my day job. I am in pretty early stages of my career and would like to maximise on my learning rather than how much I ship. I also feel like I cheat when I use an LLM to write code instead of going through the docs to learn a thing or two. So rest assured I am a bit slow with ticking the to-dos, as remarked by my peers. But that’s a debate for another post.

What I want to rant about today is missing the human connection while these writing calculators are taking over the world. You see, I have been writing code for the past 3 years all alone. After joining a company, I was really looking forward to collaborating with other developers. After all how fun is it to solve a problem together! Lo and behold, I am facing some issues with docker. I call my colleague over and they start looking into the issue. They start with the usual process of bringing the containers down and then up. I tell them I have tried it already. When this did not fix the issue, they brought over their laptop, opened Claude and start to ask it for commands. And when translating was hard, they opened Teams to send themselves the error logs, which were then copy pasted from their Teams and into the model. Claude asked them to remove the images and rebuild the containers. Since I had done this already, I suggested that we talk through the problem. They ‘hmmed’ and carried on. Eventually they solved the issue by removing the orpahned containers. While this did boost their confidence, I was left feeling quite alone.

This isn’t contained only to workspaces either. Every weekend, I make my roommate some filter coffee (which he genuinely appreciates). After getting my hands on some vegan milk options, we tried vanilla flavoured soy milk. The coffee was bitter since the soy milk was letting through all of the coffee, unlike whole milk. Understandably they did not want to experiment more with the same recipe. Incidentally, I called them for trying out hot chocolate with the same milk (after verifying that it’s not the heat that makes the milk taste burnt). They asked ChatGPT how it would taste and when they got the answer ‘It’ll taste like protein shake’, they reliablly refused. I carried on making the hot chocolate, and when it did taste a bit like protein shake (when hot), I caught myself thinking that I would have loved to make this discovery with them rather than be informed by something else over the internet.

I realise that these might be very specific traits of very specific people. This may as well be the age old rant on how phones make you more disconnected with the people around you. All I ask of you to please talk a little bit more. It may be hard, but it’s quite rewarding too!