So in a world where LLMs can churn out hundreds of words in a matter of seconds, and it can feel like there’s little point to writing articles yourself when you think that you’re just competing with LLM-written text, I still think that it’s valuable. Even if it seems like you’re just shooting content off into the void that will be inevitably seized upon by on of the AI titans and appropriated (yeah, I might resent that a little bit…) I think it’s still worth it.
Why?
You know a lot of cool stuff!
Chances are if you’ve been in the software field for quite a while, or even just getting into it, you’ll know how to do some cool things. As much as people like to talk about how software developers are “becoming commoditized” thanks to LLMs, the truth of the matter is that LLMs will always pretty much just spit out a load of code that might not even work.
The idea that say, a Program Manager can just sit down, type in “I’d like an application that calls back to an API, with these fields and a Python backend” and get something out that is even near production ready is ludicrous. What makes software work is something that LLMs can’t replicate, which is human knowledge, intuition and most importantly, experience.
I’ve started working on a game series with Rust, and while it’s quite a simple game that I could probably whip up through LLM prompting, I’m still writing about it due to my passion for the topic, and wanting to share things that I know. I’ve been writing at my blog, theanswers42.com, for quite a while now, and although I’ve recently been writing more LinkedIn articles too, it’s something I enjoy and I’d like to think that even if a passer-by hasn’t commented, they still get something out of what they’ve read on my article as they’ve gone past.
Many of the most creative and talented individuals I’ve worked with in my career have been software developers – I’ve seen them to amazing things under tight deadlines, and get out great results that you’d think had taken far more time than they did. These were the results of the talents and efforts of the developers involved, and indeed it’s quite common just to think of it as “onto the next ticket”, but for me, reading about things like this are fascinating.
For my part, I’ve spent a lot of time writing video games and graphics renderers that went pretty much nowhere, and it’s only recently I’ve started to get the itch to tell the world about them. It might not be many people – but if there’s someone out there that reads and appreciates it and learned something new, that’s reward enough.
LLMs Suck At Writing Like A Human
One thing that weighs heavily in your favor is this fact: no matter how much text people train LLMs on, the text they produce is well… not great. It’s readable, but in many cases lacks the human touch that makes reading it pleasurable. It’s not something that a human has put thought into doing, but rather just a machine extrapolating from a sentence it’s been given, and there’s something understandably cold or mechanical about it.
While some technical explanations will certainly seem similar, I enjoy writing something I know that has been written by another human. I can’t talk to everyone in the world, but what I do enjoy the idea of is that what I write comes across as genuine to others, and I’ve shared a little bit of my time and knowledge with a passer-by, even if we’ll never physically meet.
LLM text lacks, for a better word for it, soul, and while I’m sure LLMs will continue to improve as more and more text (including, alas this) gets pulled into their databases, I don’t think it’ll ever cross into the truly living feeling that people bring to content creation. It’s an intangible, sure, but there’s something that distinguishes human from machine, and that often comes across in the articles that you, the real software developer, will write.
My Blog Changed My Life
And for my own personal take: my blog really did change my life. Back when I had just graduated from Sussex University, I started work on my blog theanswers42.com. It contained a lot of whiny student politics that I’ve since largely excised, but I did also write some articles about games that I was working on.
I got my start in the technology industry with a technical writing job I applied for in Edinburgh, all the way from living down in Swansea in Wales. My blog contained among other things an article about a dreadful version of Pong I’d made in SDL and C++ while at university (no, I’m not linking to it… the code doesn’t exist and it’s crap!) and when I sent it off as an example of my writing, the hiring manager read it and loved it.
She even mentioned how she liked my phrasing and clear explanation of technical concepts on my blog, and one thing lead to another, and now I’m here many years later writing about it. Without it, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do much of what I’ve done now.
So, if you’ve got some cool stuff that you know about – tell the world! You never know where it will get you.
The Answer's 42 