Item — HN Reader

> Cooking a steak and then flushing it straight down the toilet outperforms all the slow and tedious business of eating and digesting it, too.

That would be more equivalent to writing the code and immediately deleting it.

Except this code is being deployed, and it is still (mostly) functional, at least functional enough to satisfy your employer (their “hunger” in your analogy).

> Why should I use an LLM to write code? It cannot do the job I want it to.

Because your employer is convinced that it can do the job they want it to (whether it does the job you want it to do is irrelevant, unless you're the employer, in which case 100% handwrite your code).

1 comments

> Except this code is being deployed, and it is still (mostly) functional, at least functional enough to satisfy your employer (their “hunger” in your analogy).

Bzzzt. Wrong. I don't give a fuck who's satisfied by my code. I only care about writing it.

> Because your employer is convinced that it can do the job they want it to

Bzzzt. Wrong. The code is incorrect because it is not precisely the code I would have written.

LLMs are useless to me because they don't solve the problem of actually typing the code I've written into a computer.

Again, unless you’re the employer, then you’re getting paid by someone that cares more about productivity than whether you think LLMs produce incorrect code.

All that matters is whether they agree with you.

The only control you have over this is to either a) work for yourself, or b) keep looking until you find an employer that agrees with you.

My argument is that the number of employers that fall under (b) is shrinking.

> My argument is that the number of employers that fall under (b) is shrinking.

That's great. Sucks to be them. I've doubled my prices and doubled my time estimates and I'm still turning work away.

Thing is, companies don’t care if it’s not your code or your view of it. If it works, that’s what they want. Since I stopped typing code I’ve been using my time to play some video games, read some books etc while the agents do the boring stuff (work itself). I get paid, the company is more productive, I got a bonus and a raise, everyone’s happy.

With the rise and rise of LLM slop in code, I've just had to jack my prices through the roof.

The first thing I do when I'm asked to clean up the LLM slop is "rm -rf ." and start from scratch.

You will pay a fortune for this.

Alright. My company’s money is not my money, so not my problem!

This is cope.

What is "cope"?

"I am the world hence everything i say must be correct and there can be no counter opinions because i know everything. bzzzt."