I’m seeing so much about LLMs in my feed today.

dotmavriq@social.dotmavriq.life

@jensimmons

Well there was this Harvard article following up on studies showcasing that what AI ACTUALLY does is make work harder as it pertains to expected output and shorter time frames, which is not always anchored in reality or accounting for the failure rate/need to adjust code provided by AI tooling that is often offered to developers.

https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it

And I sense truth in that, anecdotally speaking.

oldrup@mastodon.green

@jensimmons I've seen what only consuming did to my mother, so I much prefer creating by the means of my own intelligence. Also, I enjoy it; hand coding. Slow cooking.

That said, LLM's can help me identify accessibility issues I otherwise wouldn't notice, so as a skilled "linter" it does have its place.

I don't expect many to bear the costs of handmade websites much longer, and as I'm too old to delegate the craft to AI, I'm considering a shift in career.

Thanks for all the inspiration, btw.

jgarber@social.lol

@jensimmons A bit like this:

Jason Garber (@jgarber@social.lol)

“AI is coming and I must understand it.” Nah, comrade. “AI” is here and it must be destroyed and the responsible parties held accountable for their crimes against us.

social.lol (social.lol)

mbuss@fosstodon.org

@jensimmons i must say, I don’t think you can use the results of this poll for anything other than conclude that Mastoson users really really hate AI. But not at all representative of the general sentiment.

I am using it a lot these days. Was a skeptic for long. It’s Undeniably useful if you learn to use the tools properly instead of being dismissive and thinking that copy past to ChatGPT is still the name of the game in 2026

splendorr@mastodon.social

@jensimmons Feels terrible, and all of my colleagues who admit to using them are doing worse and worse work while feeling like they’re on top of the world

jasonnickel@nrw.social

@jensimmons I‘ve been avoiding it because I didn’t like how much energy it needs and how dangerous it can be for society.

But I also need to think of myself and how my coworkers are doing their work much faster now. I will not be able to compete anymore without AI. So I gave up and started using it. It does help already but there is still much to learn. The ecosystem is already so advanced that it’s hard to get into it now.

We need to solve the fundamental problems on the way.

developerjustin@mastodon.social

@jensimmons I find great use when asking these tools to “do” things and not to “know” things.

Transform a bunch of HTML that would require me to do it by hand, rework a specific conditional to work a different way, etc.

Any task that requires access to prior knowledge is hit or miss at best for me but honest to goodness “grunt work” saves me a TON of time in the aggregate.

dutchcelt@mastodon.social

@jensimmons I’m using LLMs for some things more regularly. It helps with incrementally documenting my work. I'm sometimes surprised how well it does. But it still requires a lot of checking and redaction. So, not a win for productivity.
Also, they are still awful at working on existing CSS code bases. Not sure what's going on there.

jaredwhite@indieweb.social

@jensimmons I do not use LLMs on principle, and my work as a software developer and creator continues to hum along just fine.

I also consider slopcoding to be incompatible with free/libre software, so I am very concerned both by (a) increasing slop additions to ostensibly FLOSS codebases, and (b) impending ecosystem collapse due to open software's endless scraping & license stripping by LLM vendors.

paulrosen@hachyderm.io

@jensimmons A coworker uses it and comes up with something that looks like it works pretty quick. But he misses a bunch of cases, messes up error checking, and produces new components that are nearly identical to existing ones. The more I start to straighten it out, the more it looks bad. I could add the feature quicker if I didn't have to understand the slop first.

torb@hachyderm.io

@jensimmons I don’t use it and the pressure have convinced me that I need to invest further in understanding the systems I work with.

gundersen@mastodon.social

@jensimmons I expect LLMs will get better and the cost lower, which means simple webapp will become disposable. You don't need to plan or project an app for a department, they can just have one made and then throw it away when they are done, or generate a new one when the specs change. LLMs are much better at small projects (and always will, because of the cost of context) so it's cheaper to generate many disposable apps than maintain one large complex one.

gundersen@mastodon.social

@jensimmons beyond that it's also possible to produce bespoke apps. Instead of everyone using the same calendar or task management app, with hundreds of features that nobody uses, everyone can have their own custom generated app. Atlassian can generate a jira clone not for each of their customers but for each of their customers users. Millions of uniquely generated jira boards, each one tailored to its user.

sknob@mamot.fr

@jensimmons you’re the last major browser without LLM crap crammed into it. Make it a marketing argument. There is no ethical use of GenAI.

gundersen@mastodon.social

@jensimmons in the long term I'm thinking of just in time generated code from LLMs. If an LLM can generate the code fast enough, with some future hardware, then it doesn't need to write the code before it runs, it can generate it on the fly. Then you don't have to ship code around, you just need to ship the prompt. This obviously assumes a 0% error rate, so might not be realistic, but it's fun to speculate. Most of the world runs on JiTed js code, in the future you might download the prompt only