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Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

I share this particular cynicism.

I have a list of ideas a mile long that gets longer every day, and LLMs help me burn through that list significantly faster.

However, the older I get, the more distraught I get that most people I meet "IRL" are simply not sitting on a list of problems they simply lack time to solve. I have... a lot of emotions around this, but it seems to be the norm.

If someone doesn't see or experience problems and intuitively start working out how they would fix them if they only had time, the notion that they could pair program effectively ideas that they didn't previously have with an LLM is absurd.

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> most people I meet "IRL" are simply not sitting on a list of problems they simply lack time to solve. I have... a lot of emotions around this, but it seems to be the norm

This sounds unnecessarily judgmental. Doing this is your hobby. Other people have different ways they want to spend their time. That doesn't make you superior, just different.

Honestly... no, that's not it.

You're describing arrogant superiority, which is a real thing. It is definitely me sometimes! I can own that.

What I'm describing is an observation that despite my closely held progressive ideals, most people simply do not appear to see the world through the lens of "lots of things could be better and I see several ways to start fixing them".

I could say a lot of [probably shitty and judgmental] things about perhaps why this divide exists and the myth of the wisdom of crowds vs the genius inventor.

We can concede that all great ideas are inevitably built on the shoulders of previous great ideas by people who often go uncredited - bless the lab techs - but this thread is about the fact that most people aren't even trying to be near where the innovations happen.

Also one of those with a mile-long ideas list that I can finally now burn through. I gotta say, it feels good!

Yeah and frankly the innovation would occur irrespective of llm’s.

Would it be harder? Sure. And perhaps the difficulty adds an additional cost of passion being a necessary condition to embark on the innovation. Passion leads to really good stuff.

My personal fear is we get landfill sites of junk software produced. To some extent it should be costly to convert an idea to a concept - the cost being thinking carefully so what you put out there is somewhat legible.

Yes, it'd be better if people kept their inner Oppenheimer in check.

However, I suspect it's much more like the three types of people talking about 3D printers:

- 3D printing jigs and prototypes has completely changed my workflow

- I can't find any more things to print from the vendor provided gallery

- why on earth would I want a 3D printer, you guys are geeks

LLMs are not creating a risk that nihilist socialites will disrupt how device drivers get written.

As I’ve said in my other post, I’m very confident that imagination is the true bottle neck.

Writing lines of code? Nope. If one can imagine… trust me, writing lines of code is trivial.

Most people have no imagination. So sure they can produce more stuff with llm’s but it’ll just be mostly garbage.

Perhaps they can produce some peculiar workflow that works ‘for them’. Sure. But I think about the money invested into the LLM-based projects and I highly doubt we are going to see any returns that justify the spend. What we are going to see is a felling on the profession of software engineers, since the pipe dream of AGI isn’t coming and imagination is scarce.

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