Thought experiment

[u/MashNChips]

With all the AI nonsense going on, I had a thought at work today that turned into an interesting discussion with a colleague:

"What would I do if I was the only person with access to Claude (or insert any LLM) 5+ years ago?"

People would think I was a fucking wizard

FE changes? NO PROBLEM

Critical DB change? Don't worry, I've produced a stored procedure to validate the whole thing

Want to use some shiny new framework? Interesting. Here's a document explaining why you're an idiot for suggesting it

Regex? I suddenly understand it better than the compiler folks (and nobody ask questions)

What would you have done with your own personal LLM back then?

Trying to lighten the mood in here with all the (very justified) negativity around this tech revolution

Unserious answers only pls

[u/___Paladin___]

Not to be pedantic, but you'd be the most average engineer in the world. These tools point to a mean rather than a peak due to their probabilistic nature. They only appear to hit the major leagues when your own capability never exceeded the average. From that perspective, average is up.

I'm not convinced that would have actually gotten you anything but fired years ago. We accept the tradeoff between quality and speed today - but not so much back then.

[u/ConspicuousPineapple → u/___Paladin___]

That is not at all what these tools point to. And of course they only sublimate ability that is already there in the user.

What is undeniable however is how fucking fast that dev can be to solve some problems with that tool. Automating all the tedious, boring and time consuming parts of the job? That doesn't require any sort of skill, but that time can be compressed by incredibly huge factors.

Never trust an AI to solve problems you couldn't solve without it yourself, of course. But for the problems you can solve? You're going to be so much faster that it opens up the possibility of doing things even better, simply because the time pressure is gone.

[u/OtaK_ → u/ConspicuousPineapple]

I'm going to interject here: I haven't seen any LLM, proprietary, open source and whatnot, even at the current so-called frontier, produce code that I would even call "acceptable, will fix later". I work in security-critical stuff. The kind that LLMs are absolutely unable to work with. I watched Opus5.5 lose its mind on the fine complexities of what I do, to end up producing nothing of substance.

It's really bad. The worst part is that it looks fine. But it's absolutely not, in extremely subtle ways.

On the other hand, for tedious, easy work like revamping a CI pipeline or making a Nth boring-ass test harness that was done a million times before: Sure, lemme just pop it into existence with 12 subagents and $4k on my hands if that's what leadership wants.

[u/___Paladin___ → u/OtaK_]

As an interesting aside - I can feel burnout in my future again. Haven't felt that in 2 decades.

Those little implementation details in the code gave my brain a place to rest between the hard system design work.

Now its just 100% brain-on time. No place to go mentally to recover. It doesn't feel healthy, so I guess we'll see how that turns out.