I'm very proud of my colleagues from our Research Data & Software group. One of the young female software engineers gave a seminar yesterday about the modernisation of our 30 year old in-house library for telescope & instrumentation control, and afterwards someone asked about using LLMs for this sort of thing. She did *not* hold back in her response, saying things like they might fix one thing but create three other problems in the process, that cleaning up the mess they make of your codebase takes far longer than doing the thing yourself in the first place, and accurately labelling them as technical debt generators.
It's so nice to know that at least the professional computer touchers at my workplace are united in continuing to value expertise, quality and maintainability, even as a depressing number of my other colleagues have drunk the Kool-Aid.
Anthony Horton
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2026-10-09 05:17:18 UTC
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