Posts tagged reaction
re: The Coming Loop | Armin Ronacher’s Thoughts and Writings
- 2026-06-25
More and more do I encounter people who converse with me through the indirection of an LLM.
This resonated with me. I find it to be an interesting observation. I used to think of the “LLM as translator” case in terms of language, like the universal translator in Star Trek. But it could also be a translator of concepts. Armin is an expert in software engineering, but people who are experts in different domains, can use LLMs to speak his language. The downside of this is a reduction in learning and shared vocabulary. An example from today: I asked an LLM about refac to some VueJS frontend code and it used the term “composables”, a concept I was not familiar with. By looking it up and reading about it, I learned something: Composables in the VueJS-sense are functions that handle stateful logic. It’s the logic you can extract from your component. Now if I used an LLM as a concept translator, it might have skipped the word “composables” and could have focused on the refac aspect, resulting in the loss of a learning opportunity for me. As is so often the case, it is a matter of trade offs: Will you take your time and learn or will you prioritize getting results? I know what I will do most of the time.