I think you either didn't read my response or missed the point. No matter if the LLM output is useful or not, the learning outcome is hugely impacted. Negatively.
It's like copying on your homework assignments. Looks like it gets the job done, but the point of a homework assignment is not the result you deliver, it's the process of creating that result which makes you learn something.
> I would read the official documentation of each db, forums, blog posts, stackoverflow entries, etc. It was time consuming on the searching side. The time it took to read all the sources was fine for me (it's learning time, so that's always welcomed).
This learning time that you welcomed is what you will now miss out on. The LLM gives you an answer, you don't know how good it is, you use it, and soon enough, if running into a similar issue, you will need to ask the LLM again since you were missing out on all that learning the first time which would have enabled you to internalize all the concepts.
It's like the regex engine example from the article. An LLM can create such a thing for you. You can read through it, it might even work, but the learning from this is orders of magnitudes less than what you get if you build this yourself.
> It's really the same problem as with math in school in general ("whatever is this even useful for?")
That argument is a strawman whenever it comes up because it applies to every subject. High jump? Napoleon wars? Molar weight of helium? English literature in the 19th century? What is any of that ever "useful" for? To understand the world which you live in. What a lack of education leads to is blatently obvious with the current U.S. administration. It's not about each school lesson directly translating into monetary value in a later job, neither w.r.t colored balls nor with knowing how the american civil war started.
And you didn't have the mental capacity to abstract from the colored balls to whatever application domain you were interested in? Does everything have to come pre-digested for students so they don't have to do their own thinking?
The situation is not as black-and-white as you paint it. English is an ambiguous language. It's a "no op" in the sense that there is the possibility that they ship an app update in which the crypto is comprimised. Fair, that's possible, just like it's possible that your phone is backdoored or the CIA has installed hidden cameras in your bedroom. But as long as these things have not happened, specifically as long as Signal ships an app which corresponds to the code up on github which has been audited time and time again, it's not a no op and works perfectly fine. That's very different from sending a plain-text email or painting the message contents on your window. Please stop conflating these two.
I see where you are coming from, and overtesting is a thing, but I really believe that the baseline of quality of all software out there is terrible. We are just so used to it and it's been normalized. But there is really no day going by during which I'm not annoyed by a bug that somebody with more attention to quality would have not let through.
It's not about space rocket type of rigor, but it's about a higher bar than the current state.
(Besides, Elon's rockets are failing left and right, in contrast to what NASA achieved in the 60s, so there are some lessons there too.)
I have sympathies for this argument, though it boils down to trust. Even if you roll your own client, you still need to trust some things outside of your control, be it your build environment, your phone, whatever. But most people will use somebody else's client, so need to trust whoever built that one. Or whoever supposedly audited it. The Signal authors just play that role here. Their business model is fundamentally different that that of Google or Meta, which is a main source of trust people are putting into it. Offloading the exposure to a minimum (just the client which is open source) is another. Yes there are ways around all that for an attacker, but in the end it's a game of likelihood. A journalist or dissident fearing for their life may have a different conclusion than mom and dad who want to coordinate a birthday party without big tech reading those messages and selling them to ad companies. It's good to err on the side of caution, but acting like I am the former while in reality I'm closer to the latter user type is in the end just theatre.
Perfect is the main enemy of good. I rather use Signal to escape the big tech clown show than wait for another decade for the perfect tech to come along, meanwhile either not communicating with anybody or using the exact services I really want to avoid.
I'm still waiting for the "other issues" to be explained that Signal supposedly has. I'm ok with my contacts knowing my phone number, and I opened the Signal account ages ago. Anything else to be concerned about?
> Signal's privacy terms were last updated in 2018. We are in 2025 now. It is unimaginable for any operational organization not to update their terms for 7 years.
As a privacy-concious user, I always get suspicious abouy privacy policy changes. They always become more loose instead of doing anything to my advantage. Typically because company has found a new way to use my data to make money and their lawyers realized that this requires relaxing the privacy policy. It's a good thing Signal is not playing that game.
Um, Whatsapp does that too?! Maybe there is a way to use it without a phone number, but the most common use is to have a phone number on some sign / store front with a Whatsapp symbol next to it. In many countries that's the default way to do business. Scolding Signal to use phone numbers is just weird in comparison.
Brutal counter take: If AI tooling makes you so much better, then you started very low. In contrast, if you are already insanely productive in creative ways others can hardly achieve then chances are, AI tools don't make much of a difference.
> I think broadly speaking, software has not changed much at such a fundamental level for 70 years.
I love Andrej, but come on.
Writing essentially punch cards 70 years ago, writing C 40 years ago and writing Go or Typescript or Haskell 10 years ago, these are all very different activities.
It's like copying on your homework assignments. Looks like it gets the job done, but the point of a homework assignment is not the result you deliver, it's the process of creating that result which makes you learn something.