That's what people told Ignaz Semmelweis, too, I assume. "Nothing you can do, the powers that be decided, you are a minority, you don't matter, lol!" Snickering in the shadow of what they won't confront at those who do.
Not a great analogy. A better analogy is to longbows and muskets/rifles. Longbows in the hands of a skilled user were much better weapons than early muskets, but muskets brought consistency, a lower skill floor and reduced ammunition cost. Fast forward a few hundred years and the modern incarnations of muskets make longbows look silly, and nobody would ever argue that you should go to war with longbows.
You don’t even know what we’re talking about in this thread, do you?
We’re talking about whether corporations are going to risk using LLMs in their codebase because of the theoretical legal risk that they might produce something that would fall under open source licenses, and be difficult to untangle later.
Regardless of what you think the morality is here, or what the legal situation turns out to be, this is already happening. The vast majority of corporate codebases are already “infected” by LLM outputs. Even at corporations where that’s not allowed, I promise there are devs using LLMs anyway.
It's not just about collective agreement, there's a prisoner's dilemma in there.
If some segment of engineers uses agents and outperforms engineers who don't use agents, market forces will push all other engineers to use it over time. The only way we're going back is if we get concrete evidence that engineers using agents perform worse than engineers that don't, and that evidence isn't invalidated by improved models.
