Friday, August 01, 2025
Keep calm and carry on
I haven't been writing nearly as much as I would like due to my own, well, not exactly fear, I'm not sure what the best word for this is, because of LLMs being shoved down the collective throats of everybody. It's as if the rest of the world has decided to double down on crazy pills and if you aren't also taking crazy pills, you yourself are crazy and should be shunned from society.
Or something to that effect.
It just seemed so pointless to keep writing about my ANS Forth implementation when Forth itself is a rather niche language that has less “training material” than Python, Go or Rust,
running for a criminally underrated 8-bit CPU that probably has less “training data” than Forth,
for what?
A world that has decided that expertice is an outdated concept that should be handed off to a glorified random number generator?
That “time to market” has to be minimized to such a degree that programmers should use every short cut they can,
which includes LLMs,
is now The Right Thing™ to do?
[Never mind that being “first to market” hasn't stopped companies like Microsoft,
which to my recollection,
has never been first to market with anything other than a commercial version of BASIC back in 1975,
or Apple,
which wasn't the first to market a home computer
(with or without a GUI),
or Google,
which wasn't even in the first two dozen of web search engines,
or Facebook Meta,
which wasn't the first social website,
from becoming some of the largest companies in the world.
“Time to market” my XXX!]
I also find it worrying that of all the development tools created to “help” programmers with their jobs, it's LLMs that, again in my experience, has been the only one that has been mandated from the C-suite that everybody must it it! I've never found IDEs to be useful myself, yet I've never had an employer demand I use one. So why do LLMs get shoved down our throats? I just don't understand it. With IDEs, individual developers, or maybe even a team, can decide that the use of an IDE with worth the investment and I have no problem with that. And I feel the same should be for LLMs—those developers who feel an LLM is worth using should be able to use them. But being pushed by the C-suite? When the C-suite probably has no idea how programming works? It must be some herd mentality pushed by hype.
So yes, I haven't been inclined to write much about programming because who XXXXXXX cares when LLMs will do it all for us? But then I have to forcibly remind myself that the Orange Site isn't indicative of the industry as a whole and I should just keep calm and carry on. And follow through on my own advice.
