’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s.
Well, it’s two weeks past Lucy’s as I write this, but it is still that time of the year: the time of slowing down, taking a step back from the hustle and bustle of everyday, reflecting on what has happened and what is yet to come. Perhaps no better time to put together my thoughts on LLMs, and more specifically on their use in programming.
This post is not meant to take a stance in the ongoing discussion about the merits and risks of using LLMs. A lot has been said already about things like their moral and legal aspects, their energy footprint, how they impact society at large — I will skip all of this stuff, as I don’t have anything of value to add here. I do…
’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s.
Well, it’s two weeks past Lucy’s as I write this, but it is still that time of the year: the time of slowing down, taking a step back from the hustle and bustle of everyday, reflecting on what has happened and what is yet to come. Perhaps no better time to put together my thoughts on LLMs, and more specifically on their use in programming.
This post is not meant to take a stance in the ongoing discussion about the merits and risks of using LLMs. A lot has been said already about things like their moral and legal aspects, their energy footprint, how they impact society at large — I will skip all of this stuff, as I don’t have anything of value to add here. I do have opinions, but I don’t want to convince anyone. Rather, I hope to find some words to express and let out the anxiety that has been brewing in me for the last couple of months.
Where I stand
I might call myself a “conscious LLM-skeptic”. That is, while my attitude towards LLMs is far from enthusiastic, I do use them and have found them genuinely useful on multiple occasions in day-to-day programming. I used to have a Claude Pro subscription (I’ve cancelled it for the moment but it’s not unlikely I’ll renew at some point). I have no doubt that they’re here to stay, they’ve significantly changed the landscape of software development and will continue to do so.
So why the anxiety, instead of, say, enthusiasm?
I guess a large part of it is due to the change itself. Especially given the pace of it. A lot of things that I have grown accustomed to are now different than what they used to be; things that I had taken for granted no longer are. Change naturally breeds anxiety.
But I think there’s more to it.
Conscious excitement
Let me quote first a passage from “A Study in Scarlet”, where Dr. Watson discovers the extent of Sherlock Holmes’ knowledge of the world:
His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
“To forget it!”
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
I remember my astonishment at this thought process when I first read this. I might have been 11 or so at the time. Surely, I thought, the mind isn’t quite as rigid as Holmes paints it here? Surely you can keep throwing new information at it – the more, the better – and it will adapt, processing it, improving the mental model and discarding unuseful things?
But the older I get, the more I keep coming back to this attic analogy. Especially since I’ve learned about my ADHD a few years ago. I now believe that Holmes has a point here: that one needs to be careful and conscious when deciding what to furnish their brain with. Not necessarily with respect to facts, as per Holmes, but certainly with attention.
Because it’s attention that’s the scarcest, most precious resource that my brain has to offer. Even more precious than time (which, too, is scarce). Corollary: I need to choose very consciously what I devote my attention to.
Another thing I discovered is that attention and excitement are very much intertwined. Excitement arises when thinking about something deeply, and it is possible, to a certain extent, to induce excitement. It’s conscious, too. Corollary #2: I need to choose very consciously what to be excited about. It’s just basic fuckonomics.
And I’ve made a choice for those areas not to include LLMs – lest they divert my attention from things I care about.
I care about the fundamentals of my craft. I care about programming languages and their theory. I care about the trade-offs of static vs dynamic typing; of manual vs automatic memory management. I care about algorithms and data structures. I care about clarity when expressing ideas with code. I care about abstractions.
Most importantly, I care about the fun I’ve had from learning, exploring, and applying all these things. I choose to continue to derive the fun from them.
(Incidentally, some of the most productive uses of LLMs I’ve had were when I used them as a glorified rubber duck – having casual conversations that sought to increase my understanding of the problem at hand – rather than asking them to write code.)
Are we all 10x programmers now?
In the paper “A Century of Work and Leisure”, Valerie A. Ramey and Neville Francis look at how people have been using their time throughout the 20th century – in particular, how much time they’ve been spending on domestic chores (or activities that they dub “home production”: planning, buying things, cleaning, housecare, preparing food, laundries, etc). They find that per-household amount of time spent on this has largely remained the same over time: women now spend significantly less time than they used to, but this is largely offset by the increase of time invested into home chores by men.
Why, given the revolutionary advances in technology over that time and the proliferation of washing machines, microwave ovens and other appliances?
Ulrich Schnabel in “Leisure: The Happiness of Doing Nothing” (a great book that, sadly, has not been translated to English as far as I know) cites Ramey and Francis’ work and argues the answer to be Parkinson’s law:
Parkinson’s law provides the first answer: “A job expands to exactly the extent that time is available for its completion—regardless of the actual amount of work.” […]
Put more kindly, Parkinson’s law can also be interpreted as follows: As technology saves us time, our expectations and demands increase. A hundred years ago, well-groomed clothes, a clean house, and a multi-course meal were still considered luxuries; today, these things have largely become the norm.
Now, with the advent of LLMs, I can’t help feeling that we’re going through this all over again. New technology appears that purports to save us all precious time; and then, some time later, we discover that we have just as little free time as we used to. Parkinson’s law at work again. But unlike with home management, in this case it’s not due to our increased expectations about what is or is not luxurious – it’s that expectations towards us have increased. Deliver more features! Write more code! Review more PRs! More, more, more!
We may have all become 10x programmers, but the reference point has shifted, too, so the 10x doesn’t apply anymore: the factors have to be recomputed. Where is my peace of mind?
(Yes, this is tongue-in-cheek and I can’t quantify it in any way. Remember, this is ventilation, not a meritorical argument.)
Adapt or perish
I keep having these doubts and fears. Will I still have a job in a few years? Is my ability to think deeply about problems still a valuable asset? Will I be forced to use LLMs if I want to continue working as a software engineer?
At the end of the day, I am a human. I know what it’s like to experience beauty – through my senses, in my mind, with all my flesh – and I know that code can be beautiful. At least nothing will strip me of that.
Final words
I don’t have a good conclusion. So, instead, I’ll make a statement: this blog (by which I mean the whole site, not just this article) is mine, a human’s, and does not nor will it ever contain any LLM-written content. I’m not saying that I won’t write here about LLMs ever again, but I don’t think it’s likely to happen anytime soon: I prefer to write about things that I’m excited about.
Here are some links to texts by other people that resonate with me. That’s not to say that I necessarily agree with every single word they say; I just found myself nodding along as I read them.