This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
At @self_made_human's request, I'm answering this. I strongly believe LLMs to be a powerful force-multiplier for SWEs and programmers. I'm relatively new in my latest position, and most of the devs there were pessimistic about AI until I started showing them what I was doing with it, and how to use it properly. Some notes:
LLMs will be best where you know the least. If you're working on a 100k codebase that you've been dealing with for 10+ years in a language you've known for 20+ years, then the alpha on LLMs might be genuinely small. But if you have to deal with a new framework or language that's at least somewhat popular, then LLMs will speed you up massively. At the very least it will be able to rapidly generate discrete chunks of code to build a toolbelt like a Super StackOverflow.
Using LLMs are a skill, and if you don't prompt it correctly then it can veer towards garbage. You'll want to learn things like setting up a system prompt and initial messages, chaining queries from higher level design decisions down to smaller tasks, and especially managing context are all important. One of the devs at my workplace tried to raw-dog the LLM by dumping in a massive codebase with no further instruction while asking for like 10 different things simultaneously, and claimed AI was worthless when the result didn't compile after one attempt. Stuff like that is just a skill issue.
Use recent models, not stuff like 4o-mini. A lot of the devs at my current workplace tried experimenting with LLMs when they first blew up in early 2023, but those models were quite rudimentary compared to what we have today. Yet a lot of tools like Roo Cline or whatever have defaulted to old, crappy models to keep costs down, but that just results in bad code. You should be using one of 1) Claude Opus, 2) ChatGPT o3, or 3) Google Gemini 2.5 pro.
More options
Context Copy link