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Mostly online, but in an occasional real-world conversation someone will be expressing their disinterest and dissatisfaction with LLMs in the realm of software development and they'll say, "I tried it and it just made stuff up. I don't trust it. It will take me less time to build it myself than fix all its mistakes."

My immediate follow-up question is usually "what model / LLM tool did you use and when?" because the answer is often GitHub copilot or some free-tier model from years ago.

But what I want to do is step back here like Thorsten and ask, "Aren't you curious? Don't you want to know how these tools fit into what we do and how they might start to reshape our work?"

What I don’t get it is how you can be a programmer in the year twenty twenty-four and not be the tiniest bit curious about a technology that’s said to be fundamentally changing how we’ll program in the future. Absolutely, yes, that claim sounds ridiculous — but don’t you want to see for yourself?

The job requires constant curiosity, relearning, trying new techniques, adjusting mental models, and so on.

What I’m saying is that ever since I got into programming I’ve assumed that one shared trait between programmers was curiosity, a willingness to learn, and that our maxim is that we can’t ever stop learning, because what we’re doing is constantly changing beneath our fingers and if we don’t pay attention it might slip aways from us, leaving us with knowledge that’s no longer useful.

I suspect much of the disinterest is a reaction to the (toxic) hype around all things AI. There is too much to learn and try for me to let the grifters dissuade me from the entire umbrella of AI and LLMs. I make an effort to try out models from all the major companies in the space, to see how they can integrate into the work I do, how things like Cursor can augment my day-to-day, discussing with others what workflows, techniques, prompts, strategies, etc. can lead to better, exciting, interesting, mind-blowing results.

I certainly don't think the writing is on the wall for all this GenAI stuff, but it feels oddly incurious if not negligent to simply write it off.