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Not Using Copilot

On not using copilot Thorsten Ball wrote a really thoughtful piece about LLM-based coding assistants. A lot of accomplished, productive engineers use them.

Without laying out the full cheesy analogy to the recent political events, needless to say we should all be vividly aware that people are bound to make decisions based on a cloud of emotions, prejudices, assumptions, cultural narratives, and reckons. So, taking Thorsten’s well-argued piece as true, which I think it is - LLMs are pretty good at a lot of things and are a legitimate labor-saving device used by professionals - let me poke around at some of the narratives. But at least for some of us, the need to keep asking for something, trying to define the outputs we want and clarify and re-clarify: this is managing, and sometimes it’s nicer to write in solitude than to beg the computer like an micromanager.

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