Instead of using an LLM to write me some boilerplate and basic functionality, frontend etc, why isn’t there a library where I can find all of these?

You know, something structured and shared, again, like a library, for specific purposes, and specific languages, with educational hints from development pros on the best way to do things and maybe some constructive feedback and improvements from other people?

And why were we left to deal with stackexchange instead?

Could this have been, dare I say it: gatekeeping?

@avuko Gatekeeping implies intent. I am far more willing to attribute this to incompetence, combined with a lack of good examples for younger people to learn from.

Every single one of the good examples of systems where it was easy to write simple things without boilerplate that I can think of come from the ‘90s or earlier. And, even then, they weren’t the popular ways of developing software. People tend to copy the things they’re familiar with, it’s unsurprising that people who have never been exposed to good systems design had ones.

@david_chisnall

I did mean to imply at least partial intent.

I’m sure people better equipped than me have been studying this and probably have better explanations, but the response of developers to the use of LLMs in software development reminds me of the attitude of guild members of old.

Sharing is caring my friends, and the democratisation of development is a good thing.

Not that I think LLMs are in any way contributing to that democratisation; I’d say genAI is just breaking the dependency on developers, to be replaced with an even worse dependency on big tech, with cognitive decline as a bonus.

@avuko @david_chisnall IMO part of the problem is that deep in their souls every dev wants to build frameworks that can do many things. You basically miss Quick Start guides that show you how to do $simple_thing. No one wrote that guide because they see value in $complex_things[] their project can do and probably even see $simple_thing distracting from the Real Purpose of the project.

Source: I also tend to write frameworks for everything.

@buherator @david_chisnall there is definitely also that. And I think other people are really just enjoying themselves figuring things out and actually reinventing wheels because they truly like that.

I willing to bet it probably comes down to “people are forced to play (along with) zero-sum games to stay alive” aka capitalism.

@avuko Nah, "with a little bit of extra code, my lib could also do X" is definitely not 0-sum logic. It is true though that people find complexity compelling ("complexity sells better").

Also note that gaining understanding of lib capabilities/limitations/general design *is* valuable (but also can be a prohibiting barrier of entry for small projects).

@david_chisnall