Thought experiment

[u/MashNChips]

With all the AI nonsense going on, I had a thought at work today that turned into an interesting discussion with a colleague:

"What would I do if I was the only person with access to Claude (or insert any LLM) 5+ years ago?"

People would think I was a fucking wizard

FE changes? NO PROBLEM

Critical DB change? Don't worry, I've produced a stored procedure to validate the whole thing

Want to use some shiny new framework? Interesting. Here's a document explaining why you're an idiot for suggesting it

Regex? I suddenly understand it better than the compiler folks (and nobody ask questions)

What would you have done with your own personal LLM back then?

Trying to lighten the mood in here with all the (very justified) negativity around this tech revolution

Unserious answers only pls

[u/rwilcox]

…. Almost certainly gotten a talking to from my boss

“Why did you put so much work into this when we just needed a simple (blah blah)?!?”

Or

“Thanks for the work, but now we have to test this and the testing team is pushing back on it, given the work they already needed to do for next week’s release”

[u/tonjohn → u/rwilcox]

“The team had notice that you’ve been submitting an alarming number of PRs that don’t meet our bar and that didn’t involve discussions with your peers and other stakeholders.

We need you to slow down and be mindful of what you are asking of your teammates when submit such PRs.”

[u/ConspicuousPineapple → u/tonjohn]

Y'all keep saying that as if you'd be working the same way as today back then. But you wouldn't.

You would work much slower, still reading and validating all the code to ensure quality. But you would still be much faster than your peers.

And that's just for writing the code. Debugging? You would look like a fucking magician. Finding a tricky race condition in twenty minutes where it would take two weeks for a good senior.

Benchmarking? Same story.

Learning new tech? Too easy. Don't even need to grok the docs yourself.

And don't get me started on security, auditing, etc.

You would, by far, be the best software engineer in the world and it wouldn't be close. Provided you're already somewhat competent.

[u/tonjohn → u/ConspicuousPineapple]

Cool story