Ask HN: Is the acceptance of LLMs short-sighted? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is the acceptance of LLMs short-sighted?

8 pointsmrdependable7 comments

I'm hoping someone can tell me how I'm wrong in my thinking, as this is something that has been bugging me about LLMs for a while.

If we're allowing these companies to freely take the work of others and extract all the value from it, what's going to happen when there is no more incentive to do that kind of work? The easiest example is programming. LLMs aren't coming up with any new ideas of their own. If they get to a spot where they are good enough to actually replace programmers, won't the underlying technology end up stagnating? Why would someone spend the time innovating in that space if an LLM can just ingest their work and then the owner of the LLM gets all the value out of it instead of the person who put in the work? Wouldn't we lose the critical mass of minds necessary to keep momentum with innovation?

I don’t think so. If an LLM is sufficient to write your code, then your code probably wasn’t unique enough to contribute to the shared knowledge anyways. You could make the same argument about coding frameworks,

“If everyone uses react rather than vanilla JS; won’t we lose the critical mass of minds necessary to keep momentum with innovation?”

Who is going to be left to write unique code if programming is seen as a terrible career choice?

There are still people alive today making good money writing COBOL. There are still professional blacksmiths alive today. I don’t always think the free market solves everything, but in this case specifically I think it will. When there’s a dearth of programmers, and a clear need for those programmers, wages will go up. And there will be people to fill those roles? particularly because I think it will continue to be a hobby for a long time.

It would become a contrarian "secret" used by startups.

Thought experiment:

Why can't you start your own 500-person company, but hire 0 people and instead have LLMs make up the difference?

I don’t understand your question, like start a company with a scope that would normally take 500 people? Or have a company with 500 people, and try to grow only through LLM’s and not hire anyone else.

Also I don’t understand what this thought experiment is trying to get at.

If you can't do that, how will LLMs replace software engineers?

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