I cannot agree with your dismissal of LLMs as nothingburgers. Yes they have serious limitations. No, they are not AGI. But they are in some significant cases, effective amplifiers of human intelligence. I'm going to talk about what I know. I've been a software engineer for a long, long time, going back to the waning days of punched cards in the 1970s. I've watched our slow climb through assemblers and compilers and structured programming and object oentation and scripting languages and all the myriad ways we've come up with to help faulty human meatbrains write more better code faster. The thing you know that your followers reading this won't necessarily: I'm damn good. My software is everywhere. It's in your smartphone, it's in your browser, it's in the pipeline that helps your computer track what time it is, and if you have a car that takes a swing at self-driving it's very likely in your navigational system. Having said what was necessary to establish my credentials... I know there isn't any silver bullet. I know there's always more work to be done then there are skilled hands to do it. I know we always capture the gains from our tools by increasing the scale of the projects we work on, perpetually operating at the ragged edge of systemic collapse. That said: LLMs as coding assistants are amazing and awesome. They are at least as significant as any previous step in mind amplification for programmers. I'm going to give a concrete example. I just released a program called "kindleship". It's a command-line tool that takes an ebook file, does whatever format conversion is necessary, packages it as a MIME attachment, and emails it to your Kindle library. I wanted it so I could read eBooks from non-Amazon sources comfortably on my phone, using my muscle memory for Android Kindle command gestures rather than having to learn another app. In the before times it would have taken me maybe two weeks to go from concept to something ready to ship as 1.0. Not because the code is particularly complicated, but because it's detail-intensive. Most of my time developing it would have been spent gathering knowledge about what to do in that 200 lines of Python, and then swearing because I got some detail wrong and had to backtrack and debug. With LLM assistance I was able to prompt this little program into existence in about 3 hours spread over two working days. I could even wave a hand and tell the LLM "Write a manual page for this thing", and get one that only needed very minor editing. That's a huge speed-up, 2 weeks to 3 hours. Realistically, on larger programs I only get somewhere between three times and five times my unassisted development speed. But that's still a whole lot. There's also a threshold effect. Before LLM assistance I probably never would have written kindleship at all, because I couldn't justify spending the time it would take for a relatively minor functional benefit. LLMs don't just reduce costs for the things we're used to doing, they make it practical and economic to do things we would never have tackled before. In a world that increasingly replaces atoms with patterns of computation, this matters a lot. It is anything but a nothingburger.

I'm about to do something I think I've never done before, which is assert every bit of whatever authority I have as the person who discovered and wrote down the rules of open source. After ten years of drama and idiocy, lots of people other than me are now willing to say in public that "Codes of Conduct" have been a disaster - a kind of infectious social insanity producing lots of drama and politics and backbiting, and negative useful work. Here is my advice about codes of conduct: 1. Refuse to have one. If your project has one, delete it. The only actual function they have is as a tool in the hands of shit-stirrers. 2. If you're stuck with having one for bureaucratic reasons, replace it with the following sentence or some close equivalent: "If you are more annoying to work with than your contributions justify, you'll be ejected." 3. Attempts to be more specific and elaborate don't work. They only provide control surfaces for shit-stirrers to manipulate. Yes, we should try to be kind to each other. But we should be ruthless and merciless towards people who try to turn "Be kind!" into a weapon. Indulging them never ends well.