It's a very interesting issue you raise here. Notice that even if he typed it all out himself we wouldn't be any wiser. Literally nothing would have changed. Using the "I can verify that he performed a lot of work" as a quality signal always was a questionable - albeit understandable - choice but in the LLM-age it's useless.
<super_weird_rant>
I don't think I like it, but I think we are heading towards a situation where all information is filtered, reviewed and validated before it even becomes available to you. We need to do a lot of work to define what "reviewed" and "validated" mean here, but I don't see many ways around it. This would, however, require a vast attitude shift whereby we have some way of proclaiming "facts" and "arguments" tied to "proofs" that can be automated in some fashion, not just for code, but for all communication in general.
Stuff like "X is true in 50% of cases" need to be automatically and transparently tied to some part of a system that supports your claim which itself can be tied to some greater system, etc. If we have UIs that support this cleanly we can inspect the veracity of claims ourselves as so far the validation is feasible/practical/economical. Perhaps some sort of "this claim is true under X,Y conditions"-fingerprint made by some trusted VerificationAgency, a chain of trust so to speak, like our certificate systems. Or perhaps a P2P network of open-source "ClaimVerifiers". If everything is by default written with verification in mind, not just code, but literally everything that needs to be correct, I think that would be quite interesting.
OK, this is super weird so I'll let myself out now.
I believe the development world has a few cultural issues that make it hard to focus on the issues at hand. As a group we tend to not see the forest for the trees which causes us to worry about microscopic details while ignoring overwhelmingly more important realities, like, say, economics, lack of proper communication, team alignment, power hierarchies, etc. Being male-dominated has also not helped us for as far as I can tell the field, like many others, is dominated by power play, ego and identity issues. Everyone is trying to prove to everyone else how clever they are instead of cooperating properly. I can count on one hand the programmers I met that are actually humble and not just humble bragging. I myself am guilty of this arrogance.
If we were at all competent we would have focused on the issues you mentioned. Architecture, intent, definitions, validation, actual proof that our work does what it needs to do. We didn't care because we were too busy showing ourselves and the people we look down on - the "suits" and other programmers using different styles/languages/frameworks - how superior we are and how clever we are that we can internalize and navigate Rust's syntax and C++'s foot-guns.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately depending on your perspective, I think that strategy is dying. It might be best for us to keep the eyes on the ball. What does the system need to do and how do we validate that it in fact does what it says on the tin? All the rest is noise and that includes "code". If a million monkeys on typewriters get the job done within acceptable parameters so be it.
You know the meme where a concise sentence is translated by an LLM into a loquacious formal email which is then again summarized to a concise statement by another LLM on the receiving end?
I believe that's what we need to do here. People have some interesting information to share, but they don't care about penmanship and that's not just being lazy. It takes a lot of time to produce a nice post. I cannot guarantee the author used an LLM but there sure is a suspicious amount of em-dashes.
Anyway, there are still some interesting data points so I'd recommend to run the website through an LLM to get a nice summary if the prominent TL;DR is too short for you. Times are a-changing.
<super_weird_rant>
I don't think I like it, but I think we are heading towards a situation where all information is filtered, reviewed and validated before it even becomes available to you. We need to do a lot of work to define what "reviewed" and "validated" mean here, but I don't see many ways around it. This would, however, require a vast attitude shift whereby we have some way of proclaiming "facts" and "arguments" tied to "proofs" that can be automated in some fashion, not just for code, but for all communication in general.
Stuff like "X is true in 50% of cases" need to be automatically and transparently tied to some part of a system that supports your claim which itself can be tied to some greater system, etc. If we have UIs that support this cleanly we can inspect the veracity of claims ourselves as so far the validation is feasible/practical/economical. Perhaps some sort of "this claim is true under X,Y conditions"-fingerprint made by some trusted VerificationAgency, a chain of trust so to speak, like our certificate systems. Or perhaps a P2P network of open-source "ClaimVerifiers". If everything is by default written with verification in mind, not just code, but literally everything that needs to be correct, I think that would be quite interesting.
OK, this is super weird so I'll let myself out now.
</super_weird_rant>