I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
Key takeaways
- I'm not going to repeat the arguments I made that time because my views on the subject haven' t changed.
- The other day I had a very depressing thought regarding this.
- Is my new purpose as a seasoned software engineer and open source developer to spend my days reviewing LLM code, in spite of having decided that I do not need nor want this technology myself?
I'm not going to repeat the arguments I made that time because my views on the subject haven' t changed. What has changed, however, is that the number of contributions I receive on my open source projects has gone up, and nearly all are now made with LLMs.
The other day I had a very depressing thought regarding this. All these people who submit drive-by pull requests to my projects are pushing me to spend more and more of my time reviewing and merging code that was extruded by machines. Cory Doctorow refers to people that perform this function as reverse centaurs. He calls these "frail and vulnerable people being puppeteered by uncaring, relentless machines." Ouch!
Am I a reverse centaur now? Is my new purpose as a seasoned software engineer and open source developer to spend my days reviewing LLM code, in spite of having decided that I do not need nor want this technology myself? As you can guess from the title, I'm never going to become a reverse centaur. Let me tell you how I resist the forces that want me to be one.