the takeaway i want is a. i would like people to still have fun and tinker around with things in their personal time instead of making an LLM do it all themselves b. i think we should stop compromising ethics for marketing
I know why you included it, but it did reveal your level of experience with LLMs. That’s important context for any discussion like this.
> the takeaway i want is a. i would like people to still have fun and tinker around with things in their personal time instead of making an LLM do it all themselves
I know, you wrote that much in the article. That’s what I was responding to: I don’t especially enjoy when other people start taking strong opinions about how other people should and should not spend their personal hobby time. This is why I stay away from most of the online communities for my hobbies these days: The people with strong opinions about how others should spend their personal fun time and the right and wrong ways to enjoy personal time are really not fun.
It would be one thing to write about why you choose to spend your personal time this way. The part where it turned into disdain and got preachy about how other people weren’t doing the same thing was where you lost me.
The core piece of this blog post is that the author doesn’t use LLMs for fun work because they do the fun work to have fun. Okay. Nothing new there. I some times grow vegetables myself and eat them instead of buying them from the store because I think it’s fun. I don’t feel the need to go around sneering at people who offloaded all of their vegetable growing to someone else. I also don’t like associating with people who get smugly superior and condescending about their personal gardening.
In fact, even though I enjoy gardening and nerding out about it, I don’t like talking to the gardening snobs who have turned it into a part of their personality and who think it makes them superior to the lowly people who don’t garden.
And that’s the exact vibe I get from the articles like this, where the topic drifts into virtue signaling and criticizing the LLM users.
There have been an exhausting supply of these articles for the past few years, and there’s frequently a section like this in each of them:
> i truly have tried to use llms before, just to try it out. nothing i was going to publish as research, but i really couldn't and it left me never wanting to use an llm again
I won’t judge anybody for not using LLMs or for using LLMs for their fun work. Do whatever you want for fun! Don’t let virtue signaling posts like this one shame you into thinking there’s a right way or wrong way to enjoy your fun project time.
That said, I find that to get good discussion about the pros and cons of AI on our thinking you have to look beyond these people who just don’t get LLMs at all. You can’t really understand this topic until you’ve seen both sides.
I wouldn’t find it interesting to read an article on this topic from someone who never learned to program but only uses LLMs to write code because they do not understand the other side. Imagine seeing “I tried to learn how to code once but it didn’t really click for me. It left me never wanting to write code again.” Then they went on to talk about the brilliance of vibecoding with some collected examples of hand-written code causing problems. This article is essentially that, but from the other perspective.