A GenAIration Lost In Space
To show you exactly how I use LLMs in prose, I've included a diff between the last version I wrote and the<br>version that an LLM helped me with. Click "diff" to see the LLM changes.
A GenAIration Lost In Space
I saw Leave Me Behind on hacker news earlier<br>today about how a software engineer wants conversation and learning more than LLM-speed development<br>practices.
I've lived in Intentional Community before; I think a lot about community, and I conceive of the cultural<br>piece of DevOps mostly as a community-building exercise. The blog post made me think about different<br>LLM-using groups and I tried to categorise them a touch:
I don't want my community replaced with AI agents<br>I see some open source communities in this bucket<br>I see some individual developers in this bucket, too.
I like that this AI helps my skills move faster
I think of this group as one that already has a skill and uses AI to enable it further. People that rely<br>on words for a living are very much in this group e.g. writers, software engineers, lawyers.
I think my LLM-output means I'm a $YOUR_PROFESSION expert, too!
These people are at best oblivious, and at worst trolling. Singing kareoke does not make you a<br>songwriter.
I hope this is the group that the overwhelming LLM-generated spam hitting open source software projects<br>belongs to.
I think my LLM-output means I'll be more successful at $YOUR_PROFESSION than you<br>Some are taking advantage of current levels of interest from venture capital.
Singers don't write songs, but they are really singing. They can and do make more money than<br>songwriters.
I'm not trying to be exhaustive here, just capturing some real trends.
Community
The heartbreak here is watching the interaction of people in the first bucket and third bucket. It's<br>reminiscent of how doctors couldn't get a word in on social media during the pandemic, but people selling<br>ragebait were everywhere. What do you do when you want to be heard, but all the loudest voices are from<br>people emulating the form of your prose and arguments, but without any of the substance?
That third group reminds me of flat-earth folks. Some are well intentioned, many are genuinely stumped by<br>the argument 'water finds its level' because they don't see a body of water bend, but there's clearly a<br>lot of grifters and outright liars just making a buck.
Still, watching community interaction die is heartbreaking. I'm hoping it evens out in the long run, but<br>for now those LLMs have some loud voices.
This all reminds me of the song American Pie, by Don Mclean. He sings about changes he saw in his<br>lifetime, a shift in the culture, a loss of innocence. The Indie-Web used to be differentiated from<br>commercial ventures by whether you were on a small custom site or on a commercial portal. LLMs mean that<br>our small community can't tell any more if the author wrote the words and had the ideas, unless it's<br>egregious slop.
Me, I'm hopeful. Personal expertise is needed today. The most powerful LLMs fall apart with hallucinated<br>nonsense pretty quickly; their best codebases hit hard security issues; their best prose sounds like<br>absolute ass. If you don't know how to identify that 200 dependencies being pulled into a codebase to<br>reverse a string is probably insane, or if you don't have the ear to hear the difference between<br>slop-prose and good prose, well, I hope you learn. Understanding the details is much more fun.
A GenAIration Lost In Space
I saw Leave Me Behind on Hacker News earlier<br>today about a software engineer who wants conversation and learning more than LLM-speed development<br>practices.
I've lived in Intentional Community before; I think a lot about community, and I conceive of the cultural<br>piece of DevOps mostly as a community-building exercise. The blog post made me think about different<br>LLM-using groups and I tried to categorise them a touch:
I don't want my community replaced with AI agents<br>I see some open source communities in this bucket<br>I see some individual developers in this bucket, too.
I like that this AI helps my skills move faster
I think of this group as one that already has a skill and uses AI to enable it further. People that rely<br>on words for a living are very much in this group e.g. writers, software engineers, lawyers.
I think my LLM-output means I'm a $YOUR_PROFESSION expert, too!
These people are at best oblivious, and at worst trolling. Singing karaoke does not make you a<br>songwriter.
I hope this is the group that the overwhelming LLM-generated spam hitting open source software projects<br>belongs to.
I think my LLM-output means I'll be more successful at $YOUR_PROFESSION than you<br>Some are taking advantage of current levels of interest from venture capital.
Singers don't write songs, but they are really singing. They can and do make more money than<br>songwriters.
I'm not trying to be exhaustive here, just capturing some real trends.
Community
The heartbreak here is watching the interaction of people in...