An Audience of LLMs

There is a lot of doom and gloom with the state of software engineering. Understandably, there is a lot of change in a short period.

Generally, I remain long optimistic with short bursts of pessimism. Think about the tutorials on this site, millions (according to analytics) have benefited from it. The audience is now LLMs who read it, and just output the code as completed. The human isn't understanding it, nor do they need to.

But the work was never written for the reader, but me, the writer. I'd spend my time tinkering with a new technology, eventually figure it out, get bored and put it down. It was a medium to capture the learning. Take the "hours" of toil, and simplify it into a few simple steps. I was the audience, and that mostly remains true today.

The truth is the toil has shorten from hours to 30 seconds as the LLMs chews through tokens. That's remarkable, and scary in the same moment. That level of improvement can be overwhelming, but I wouldn't go back to toiling on it for hours. If I could have my simple 10 step plan at the start, I think I would have moved faster, and that's what I have.

I'm continue to be excited about the future and what it holds.