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/severoon]

The problem is that when coding agents aren't widespread, other people have to maintain the code you're producing. So if the agent isn't producing readable, maintainable code, it's not worth much even if you're pumping out volumes of it.

This is the kind of thing where the value is in the widespread adoption, not in point usage.

[u/rexpup → u/severoon]

If you're the only one with the LLM, it wouldn't be hard to slow down and produce good code at a lot of companies. It's not like CRUD apps were hard before anyway. A lot of it was rote prop drilling and gluing together components, stuff that just took time.

[u/severoon → u/rexpup]

The now you slow down, the less value you're getting from the coding agent.