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It’s hard to describe how soul-sucking the process of handing over development to an LLM is, at least for some of us. Even if I have the luxury of reading the slop and wrestling with it, there’s something mind crushing in the process. I don’t understand exactly myself why I hate it so damn much. There’s something psychological going on. I’ve worked with no purpose before, coding stuff because management says so even if I knew it was going to tank hard or it was clearly wrong. This hits different. It’s worst than boring. It’s worst than loss of purpose.
It removes any creativity I have in the process. Complex decision making is no longer mine, the only say I have is Accept or Reject (and Roll Again). It’s soul crushing because entire process now has no soul.
And my coworkers who have bought in completely are now so lazy they don’t even call in to meetings anymore, they don’t answer questions, they let AI run the entire SDLC. When they get replaced by some MBA who knows how to hit the same buttons, they will be completely blindsided. And they will have nobody to blame but themselves.
There are 2 major types of devs in terms of their motivations:
- People who were drawn to the profession due to passion of translating/architecting solutions to abstract issues (frequently with as much optimization & elegance as possible).
- Business majors/hussle culture Bros that were drawn in by the profitability & relative esoteric supremacy.
The former are the people who report this feeling. The latter are the people perpetuating the grift & doing mental gymnastics to calm the cognitive dissonance that what they’re churning out isn’t ultimately slop.
There’s another type, which is like me, who develop as a means to have a tool I need.
I wanted a better way to manage my cross-device libraries (desktop, laptop, NAS), and the multi-pane file managers didn’t work great for me, so instead I used Claude to build one that has native per-pane ssh support, streamed video and music preview clips, etc etc.
Capitalism is always gonna Capitalism, doesn’t matter what type of tools are at play.
If it weren’t for the implicit evils from mass scale LLMs that drain natural resources & are built off of mass theft, I would absolutely use them for little one-off low stakes things that rarely call for long term maintenance. But I cannot reconcile the relatively minor perks with supporting massively unethical & harmful trends & corporations.
Sadly, they exist irregardless of our little projects. Financially supporting them is one thing, and if your own ethics prevent you from using a weapon of the enemy, as it were, that’s fine, but abstention is not actually doing anything to oppose them.
The water consumption of any LLM compute time I’ve used is almost assuredly less than a single bath, and I’ve certainly skipped more baths in my life than I probably should have. :P
And more importantly, an hour of Netflix uses SIGNIFICANTLY more water than an hour of text LLM generation, so most people are not actually having the impacts on water consumption they likely think they are.
For me it’s the constant pressure to deliver more and with shorter deadlines while still being held accountable when things inevitably go wrong.
It was good enough for George Jetson, it is good enough for them.
He could have configured it to auto approve.
In the enterprise you could link jira tickets to github copilite on the cloud and it makes and merges and deploys PRs for you.
