The LLM post

Sometimes I am slow to thought and slow to action. It takes me a minute to gather my thoughts and see what there is to see about a subject. LLMs (Large Language Models) are something I've chewed on for a while, and I'm still not sure if I've really explored well enough how I feel about them. They have impacted me as well as my trade, software development. I will not be sharing something you can learn in this writing. There will not be a guide on how to create a banana split on protocol. It is going to be much more personal, and maybe a bit more therapeutic for me than for you. I am going to focus on my personal feeling of displacement in a changing world. Not so much about LLMs themselves, whether they're good, bad, or something in between. I've got to sort myself out first before the rest; I believe.

The history of labor, or as I know it

To kind of frame my state of mind, I thought I'd share a bit about my understanding of labor. Or more so how I've seen professions and how various members of my family made a living. How that has changed, and why it changed.

My grandmother was born in the 1930s, during the Great Depression and the rationing of WWII. They lived off the land as farmers; what they couldn't make, they bought by selling livestock. My mother said her parents (same grandmother) had done similar until the 1970s when small scale farming like that could not provide for a family of 5. They both got factory jobs in the "city". My father worked in factories until the early 2000s, when he started teaching. He had started night classes to earn a degree. My mother is a teacher as well; my mom had shown it was a stable job compared to the factory jobs leaving the area.

I graduated in 2013. I did not have the grades or the savings for a degree. Or really even knew what I wanted to do. Hopped from job to job until 2015, when I started with a local tech company as the guy who fixed printers internally. I taught myself how to code during this time, and the same company was kind enough to give me a shot at software development in 2018. That's what I've been doing more or less for the last 8 years. A total of 11 with the company.

As you can see from this quick history that just about everyone I've known has had a career change in their life, or watched their parents make one. Usually, due to the changing times. Thankfully, and knock on wood, I have job security at the moment, but it's hard not to see parallels. I've known over 11 years of solid job security. By history, I am probably close to a shake up, and in many ways that’s what it feels like is happening. I can't help but wonder about the impact LLMs will have on that, as well as on those new developers who want to follow a familiar path.

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

I usually look at the glass half full. It will work out one way or another, and we'll pick up the pieces after. But there is a melancholy, and maybe even some fatigue with the rise of LLMs.

There was a video I watched when I was learning to code. It was a series of interviews about people who code and why. There was a woman who said that she became interested because it was the closest thing to magic she had ever seen. That has always stuck with me.

What some of these LLMs can do with code feels very much like magic. With a sentence, it can make ideas come alive. A wave of a hand and there's usually something tangible, something that a lot of times would take me a day to even start. It's not always something maintainable or complete. But it is amazing what they can do with code. A tool that I practiced with weekly, honed to a level that let me create just about anything I could want, could soon be obsolete. Or at least changed from what it was, from what I had trained with, what I make a living off of. I know writing code is not the only skill in our trade. There's a good chance a LLM will never fully replace that even. But there is still a loss in that the tool is not the same as it was.

There's also a fatigue in LLMS, or at least in their output. A lot of time, care, and thought goes into software development, well, okay, maybe not every project. But usually at least time, it would take time to even see your ideas bloom. To get the vision across to another person. The fruit of your labor would take time to grow and be shown to others. Now ideas to some kind of proof of concept takes an afternoon. The fatigue that creeps in here is that I see just so many new projects, maybe not fully fleshed out or ever to be completed. But it feels like a non stop flood of one after another. One complete loop of an idea to something tangible over and over and over and over and over. It's disheartening to see things you've worked on, spent time perfecting, be pushed to the side or never completed because someone did it in an afternoon. Don't get me wrong, it's amazing to see so many people being able to create for the first time. Coding is a pretty high barrier of entry. I think we forget how little we knew at the start as developers. But can hold two feelings at once. Joy at the new doors being open for some, but sadness that a craft you've spent time on is being replaced, sometimes cheaper and faster than what I can produce.

As someone who mostly looks at the code and not as much the user interface. The job has changed, with a part of the creativity being replaced by reading the results of something else being the creative one in this instance. The work changes from writing to reading much more. Sometimes it's the output of an LLM you used, or sometimes the onslaught of PRs from others without time to reset. There are still other parts of the job that stay the same. But there is a shift from one part that trained me for the next, that I worry about losing.

A different road traveled

I personally know of 3 other people from my hometown who followed a similar path. Entry level coding jobs are a pretty big pay bump where I come from, even if it's at an insurance company or something similar. The median household income in 2024 was around 48k. And a lot of those tech jobs were close to that for a single person. These were opportunities for people to provide better for their families. And often they could get this from what they could learn on their own and by becoming juniors at jobs that mostly gave them time to grow. A lot of the things that are being cut.

I think some people who go into this field learn by brute force, myself included. Trying things over and over until they work. Finding solution after solution until they start to recognize what the better solutions are. Learn by doing until success. I’m afraid those types of minds may have a harder time learning in this new era. I worry about an over reliance on these tools. It's a similar feeling to how some new coders would learn frameworks that abstract web development. There's a missed opportunity to learn from doing and how it's made. Nothing inherently wrong with these web frameworks, but it does lock you in and sometimes makes it harder to move on to something new if you don't know the fundamentals of web development. Similar to the lessons you learn from writing projects by hand and researching hard problems.

It's a new world in many ways. In my life, I've seen the ways for a common person to gain information via research move from the card catalogs in libraries , searching the internet, and now onto asking LLMs. The LLMs usually do the previous two for you in a sense. You could always ask someone a question and get an answer, but I always found learning in research. I would learn something else along the way; it was a journey. I think there may be some of that still in LLMs, but I can't help but wonder what's lost when the skill of research is not practiced as much as it once was.

Missed connections

There’s a joy in learning something so well you want to write about it, or learning something well while you write about it that feels like it may be lost. A bit of that human connection when someone asks a question or compliments the writing. It's awesome when you learn from the work of someone else and you can put a face/name to that person. I’m sure there will be new things to write and new people to read them, but it’s another task LLMs cut out of the process since it does the reading for you.

There's also the joint search for an answer. You and someone else may both be trying to find the answer and bouncing things off each other. You can do that with LLMs, and sometimes it's more comfortable if you are working by yourself. But it is an experience that feels like it is fading a bit.

Professionally, I am seeing less and less questions asked of me about things. Some of it is a blessing and has not weaved out the big interesting questions. But I'm still seeing how I feel from a message of "Hey how does xyz work" only to be followed up shortly with "nvm i asked chatgpt." It's different, and a lot fewer calls during the day.

All in all, LLMs feel lonely. There is a comfort in being alone, but I can't help but feel like a danger as well with too much for me personally. You never want to surround yourself with yes men , and I can't help but feel there's a touch of that in the chat window to the LLM.

I still don't know

I still don't have an answer on LLMs. I wrote a pretty bleak post. There are positives it brings, But the positives are not what has been weighing me down when I think about them and the future of my career. I do feel better having written down what I do feel. I don't think I hate them, but I can't help but be wary. It's an unknown. Others before me tackled just as big or smaller unknowns. I can't help but reflect on that and adapt.

I appreciate you taking the time to read my thoughts and maybe helping you feel not as alone in a changing world.

If you enjoyed this may also like The Friction I Don't Want to Lose from @georgerodier.com that echoes a lot of my thoughts I wrote about here with the fear of loss of learning with LLMs. @mastrojs.bsky.social echos a lot of similar feelings when I compared LLMs abstracting similarly web frameworks did web development in their post Is AI causing a repeat of Frontend’s Lost Decade? . I've loved both that they explore in much more detail some points I've thought on here.