leftzero

And I'm saying that I could have been that developer if I were twenty years younger.

They're not bad developers, they just haven't yet been hurt enough to develop protective mechanisms against scams like these.

They are not the problem. The scammers selling the LLM's as something they're not are.

I was lucky enough to not have access to LLMs when I was learning to code.

Plus, over the years I've developed a good thick protective shell (or callus) of cynicism, spite, distrust, and absolute seething hatred towards anything involving computers, which younger developers yet lack.

No. LLMs are very good at scamming people into believing they're giving correct answers. It's practically the only thing they're any good at.

Don't blame the victims, blame the scammers selling LLMs as anything other than fancy but useless toys.

Having to deal with pull requests defecated by “developers” who blindly copy code from chatgpt is a particularly annoying and depressing waste of time.

At least back when they blindly copied code from stack overflow they had to read through the answers and comments and try to figure out which one fit their use case better and why, and maybe learn something... now they just assume the LLM is right (despite the fact that they asked the wrong question and even if they had asked the right one it'd've given the wrong answer) and call it a day; no brain activity or learning whatsoever.

The post specifically mentions blue eyes and blond hair, both of which are recessive, if I'm not mistaken.

This makes me think it might have been written by someone who knew what recessive traits are and was just mocking the particular brand of racist that would want to perform “an epic bleaching”...

What's worse is that half the coordinates probably ended up as dates...

Are search engines worse than they used to be?

Definitely.

Am I still successfully using them several times a day to learn how to do what I want to do (and to help colleagues who use LLMs instead of search engines learn how to do what they want to do once they get frustrated enough to start swearing loudly enough for me to hear them)?

Also yes. And it's not taking significantly longer than it did when they were less enshittified.

Are LLMs a viable alternative to search engines, even as enshittified as they are today?

Fuck, no. They're slower, they're harder and more cumbersome to use, their results are useless on a good day and harmful on most, and they give you no context or sources to learn from, so best case scenario you get a suboptimal partial buggy solution to your problem which you can't learn anything useful from (even worse, if you learn it as the correct solution you'll never learn why it's suboptimal or, more probably, downright harmful).

If search engines ever get enshittified to the point of being truly useless, the alternative aren't LLMs. The alternative is to grab a fucking book (after making sure it wasn't defecated by an LLM), like we did before search engines were a thing.

I've been finding it a lot harder recently to find what I'm looking for when it comes to coding knowledge on search engines

Yeah, the enshittification has been getting worse and worse, probably because the same companies making the search engines are the ones trying to sell you the LLMs, and the only way to sell them is to make the alternatives worse.

That said, I still manage to find anything I need much faster and with less effort than dealing with an LLM would take, and where an LLM would simply get me a single answer (which I then would have to test and fix), while a search engine will give me multiple commented answers which I can compare and learn from.

I remembered another example: I was checking a pull request and it wouldn't compile; the programmer had apparently used an obscure internal function to check if a string was empty instead of string.IsNullOrWhitespace() (in C# internal means “I designed my classes wrong and I don't have time to redesign them from scratch; this member should be private or protected, but I need to access it from outside the class hierarchy, so I'll allow other classes in the same assembly to access it, but not ones outside of the assembly”; similar use case as friend in c++; it's used a lot in standard .NET libraries).

Now, that particular internal function isn't documented practically anywhere, and being internal can't be used outside its particular library, so it wouldn't pop up in any example the coder might have seen... but .NET is open source, and the library's source code is on GitHub, so chatgpt/copilot has been trained on it, so that's where the coder must have gotten it from.

The thing, though, is that LLM's being essentially statistic engines that'll just pop up the most statistically likely token after a given sequence of tokens, they have no way whatsoever to “know” that a function is internal. Or private, or protected, for that matter.

That function is used in the code they've been trained on to figure if a string is empty, so they're just as likely to output it as string.IsNullOrWhitespace() or string.IsNullOrEmpty().

Hell, if(condition) and if(!condition) are probably also equally likely in most places... and I for one don't want to have to debug code generated by something that can't tell those apart.

It could be, in a monkeys with typewriters sort of way... 🤷‍♂️

Sure, but if you're copying from stack overflow or reddit and ignore the dozens of comments telling you why the code you're copying is wrong for your use case, that's on you.

An LLM on the other hand will confidently tell you that its garbage is perfect and will do exactly what you asked for, and leave you to figure out why it doesn't by yourself, without any context.

An inexperienced programmer who's willing to learn won't fall for the first case and will actually learn from the comments and alternative answers, but will be completely lost if the hallucinating LLM is all they've got.

The other day we were going over some SQL query with a younger colleague and I went “wait, what was the function for the length of a string in SQL Server?”, so he typed the whole question into chatgpt, which replied (extremely slowly) with some unrelated garbage.

I asked him to let me take the keyboard, typed “sql server string length” into google, saw LEN in the except from the first result, and went on to do what I'd wanted to do, while in another tab chatgpt was still spewing nonsense.

LLMs are slower, several orders of magnitude less accurate, and harder to use than existing alternatives, but they're extremely good at convincing their users that they know what they're doing and what they're talking about.

That causes the people using them to blindly copy their useless buggy code (that even if it worked and wasn't incomplete and full of bugs would be intended to solve a completely different problem, since users are incapable of properly asking what they want and LLMs would produce the wrong code most of the time even if asked properly), wasting everyone's time and learning nothing.

Not that blindly copying from stack overflow is any better, of course, but stack overflow or reddit answers come with comments and alternative answers that if you read them will go a long way to telling you whether the code you're copying will work for your particular situation or not.

LLMs give you none of that context, and are fundamentally incapable of doing the reasoning (and learning) that you'd do given different commented answers.

They'll just very convincingly tell you that their code is right, correct, and adequate to your requirements, and leave it to you (or whoever has to deal with your pull requests) to find out without any hints why it's not.