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Back in 2022, my at-the-time workplace decided to sponsor folks for AWS certifications. To get people to start studying for the test, they asked that folks pick one of the many services or configurations you can/might/will end up using on AWS and do a 1-hour group discussion on it.

"Group discussion" here was implied. We were asked to make presentations. And so people did. For whatever reason, despite not being as eager to get that certification as other folks had been, I was asked to "present" a "session" on VPCs, which threw me for a minute. Because who cares about VPCs?

I was wrong, of course. It was a bit of fun to do the reading on VPCs and then CIDR blocks and the general principles of designing and building networks — all very interesting stuff, a rabbit hole leading down into a veritable warren of topics that I wish I'd taken better notes on. But anyway.

I prepared a slideshow of maybe 8 slides? Mostly tables and diagrams, no notes on there. Didn't want to turn it into a session of reading off of the screen, didn't want people to feel sleepy staring at a wall of text. Closer to a demo-ish vibe, jumping around between the AWS console and the show.

Which took all of 30 minutes, with the rest remaining for questions and activities. With the number of folks who'd already done presentations in the weeks prior, I wanted to keep things lively. Silly questions and hypotheticals welcome. Like, what if we want an EC2 instance to have 2 IP addresses?

And for the most part, I got what I wanted. It was a good session! CIDR blocks and the Classful model of networking alone alone wrinkled a few brains during that session. However, there's always folks who miss the point of group discussions. And there were a few around that day too.

At the end of my slideshow, before starting the broader discussion with the dumb hypotheticals and so on, I'd asked the group at large, "What even is a VPC?" — informally, almost jokingly, in an effort to put everyone at ease. I saw a couple of colleagues start typing. Likely into Google search.

And then read out, verbatim, what they saw on their screens. I asked where they'd found that answer. They said it was from a blog post. I asked how they could be sure that what they were reading was correct and accurate. They said it was the first Google result, which ought to be good enough, right?

Stuff like that used to happen often at that workplace. I'm glad I left. The places I've worked since then have been better, but there are always people like that. LLMs have given some of them a lot of leeway towards this behaviour. How do we expect to build a community of people actually interested

I decided to give Claude a shot at making what I was trying to make. I bought a few dollars' worth of credits, configured the auth token, and let it rip. It took a few minutes, and in a separate git branch, made what I was trying to make. It felt gross. It wasn't me who made this.

I could understand the code. I suppose with a couple hours' prep (to get more familiar with the language) I'd have written something similar. But this wasn't me. Why would I want this? The whole point of trying to make the thing myself was that I'd made it, brought it into existence with my hands.

And this code in this branch was, one way or another, a stranger's labour. It was someone else who had gone to the trouble of learning and making and sharing. What did I get out of using an LLM for my task? Nothing. I spent a few dollars and got some code, but having the code was not the point.