“The problem isn’t just laziness. It’s degradation. Engineers stop exploring. Stop improving. Stop caring. One more layer of abstraction. One more lazy fetch call inside a render loop. Eventually, you’re living in a cathedral of technical debt, and every user pays.”
We all predicted this when web frameworks and object relation mappers were introduced… And we were right… Kind of. The average programmer is certainly worse - but there’s also many more of us, getting a lot more done. And there’s still plenty of us who master the craft.
The differences here are that ORM and web frameworks weren’t actively making the job harder and the sheer surface area of the problem.
If you fuck up with a framework or an ORM, it generally just fails to work, the magic internals might not be super helpful with their error messages, but such is the nature of the tradeoffs.
If you fuck up with an LLM you get something that generally compiles and looks like it should work, that’s much more of a problem for both you and anyone who then needs to go trawling through, looking for the issues.
This quote has the no one wants to work anymore vibe.
We all predicted this when web frameworks and object relation mappers were introduced… And we were right… Kind of. The average programmer is certainly worse - but there’s also many more of us, getting a lot more done. And there’s still plenty of us who master the craft.
The differences here are that ORM and web frameworks weren’t actively making the job harder and the sheer surface area of the problem.
If you fuck up with a framework or an ORM, it generally just fails to work, the magic internals might not be super helpful with their error messages, but such is the nature of the tradeoffs.
If you fuck up with an LLM you get something that generally compiles and looks like it should work, that’s much more of a problem for both you and anyone who then needs to go trawling through, looking for the issues.