Cheating is All You Need
I’ve rewritten this post so many times. It’s about AI. But AI is changing so fast that the post is out of date within a few days. So screw it. I’m busting this version out in one sitting.
(Spoiler alert: There’s some Sourcegraph stuff at the end, including a product plug and some recruiting stuff. But >80% of this post is just about LLMs–GPT etc.–and you, a programmer.)
There is something legendary and historic happening in software engineering, right now as we speak, and yet most of you don’t realize at all how big it is.
LLMs aren’t just the biggest change since social, mobile, or cloud–they’re the biggest thing since the World Wide Web. And on the coding front, they’re the biggest thing since IDEs and Stack Overflow, and may well eclipse them both.
But most of the engineers I personally know are sort of squinting at it and thinking, “Is this another crypto?” Even the devs at Sourcegraph are skeptical. I mean, what engineer isn’t. Being skeptical is a survival skill.
