This is a very fatalistic take. While I understand where it's coming from, I try not to share the same mindset: engineers getting increasingly distant from how things are getting built is not something that will "undoubtedly happen, whether we like it or not".
Also:
> Now there is obviously a question if this desire to understand the code is one that I will still have a few years from now.
I do not think we should be having doubts like this. Either you consider understanding the code you ship and allowing your future self to be able to work on the system you're building to be a value, or you don't. I, for one, do, and I do not think using LLMs and coding agents will affect my point of view on that.
an EC2 instance gives exactly what you're told you'll be getting. You pay for a VM in some public cloud, you get it.
It's not that Claude code isn't a finite product per-se, I certainly can find some value in it. What I'm saying is that people selling it, through the convenient talks of prominent voices on the Internet and gullible C-suites, are trying to make it look like it's the only software engineer the world will need from now on. What makes me mad is not the deceptive advertising, that's already everywhere, it's the fact that the industry is happily believing all of this. If you raise any doubt, it must be that you haven't tried with the right skill.
I absolutely understand the power user perspective. The point is not that, and maybe I wasn't clear enough in pointing it out.
Here, something different is going on instead of the usual "base tool is ok for 90% of use cases, remaining 10% is covered by plugins and extensions". A lot of developers are finding it difficult to commit to agentic coding workflows, feeling a stretch on a lot of different aspects.
Companies, with the help of a very prominent and vocal part of the web and social media community, are addressing every issue by simply blaming the users, saying it's their fault if they're not keeping up with all the alleged advancements in prompt strategies. See the whole "maybe you haven't tried it in the last two months, everything's changed now". While it's true that things have been moving very fast, the fundamental idea behind the technology is the same, and some concerns about it simply cannot be wiped away by scaling some factors.
To me, this kind of talk exhibits the very cultish and con side of the whole genAI train. In a way, it does a poor job especially when the intent is positive about the technology, it sheds a bad look on it.
Generally, and more so with paid products, one should expect to get something that is ready to be used, tuned by who's selling it at the best of their efforts. Instead, this is basically saying that the product is actually not much more than an empty box, and that it is your responsibility to augment it with third-party plugins and markdown texts that make it finally useful. And you better be carefully selecting the skills you install, you don't want to end up with second tier material made by GithubInfluencerA, you definitely need the work of GithubInfluencerB.
In the end, it's what is giving companies fuel to keep the hype running, because it allows to counter every possible argument or doubt about the technology, especially the ones made in good faith. No matter the problem you're facing, the blame is definitely on you, the user, for not setting up the tool in the right way.
I'm struggling in a lot of ways in accepting LLMs, but if I'll ever come completely sold on them and take this technology seriously, it won't be before this mood has gone away.
I assume you're some sort of programmer and I genuinely wonder how in the world can someone in good faith downplay non-determinism and ambiguity when talking about a programming language.
High-level languages can certainly yield inefficient code when compiled, or maybe different code among different compilers, but they're always meant to allow their users to know exactly what to expect from what they put together in their programs. I've always considered this a hard fact, I simply cannot wrap my head around working in a way that forces me to abandon this basic assumption.
> These models are alien intelligences that could occupy an unimaginably vast space of possibilities (there are trillions of weights inside them), but which have been RL-ed over and over until they more or less stay within familiar reasonable human lines.
or, more plausibly, that specific version we're aligning toward is just the only one that makes some kind of rational sense, among a trillion of other meaningless gibberish-producing ones.
Do not fall for the idea that if we're not able to comprehend something, it's because our brain is falling short on it. Most of the time, it's just that what we're looking at has no use/meaning in this world at all.
Since I've never used them, how could API keys for Firebase or Maps be safe for embedding in client side code?
I mean, I get that authentication to the service is performed via other means, but what's the use of the key then?
I'm guessing it's just a matter of binding service invocations to the GCP Project to be billed, by first making sure that the authenticated principal has rights on that project, in order to protect from exfiltration. That would still be a strange use case for what gets called an "API key".
Also:
> Now there is obviously a question if this desire to understand the code is one that I will still have a few years from now.
I do not think we should be having doubts like this. Either you consider understanding the code you ship and allowing your future self to be able to work on the system you're building to be a value, or you don't. I, for one, do, and I do not think using LLMs and coding agents will affect my point of view on that.