March 14, 2026
LLMs are an interesting technology. I'm a self-taught programmer, something that always gave me imposter syndrome. Maybe learning it systematically at school really does have big advantages over tinkered self-learning. But if the script were flipped, the fact that I went to school for supply chain never has me thinking someone who's tinkered repeatedly knows less than I do; and it's quite possible that it's the other way around. If someone does something supply chain related, especially repeatedly, they have no other choice but to learn its intricacies; possibly better than someone who only half-paid attention in school. So the learning is in the doing. With code, LLMs completely change what it means to do.
Sure to improve in a variety of ways over the years, LLMs have already in their current state made the barrier to entry miniscule. So what does this do to programming? While talking to a friend, I found myself drawing the analogy to my experience with music production. As a teenager in the 2000s, I was in awe of music production software. I couldn't play any instruments for production-grade music, though I took sitar and piano classes as a kid. But I could click about on a computer and produce fun-sounding music. Previously niche, electronic music exploded and became a category of its own. Decades later, most music is produced and recorded electronically even if it sounds analog; human imperfection included.
What I noticed as I tinkered my way into a few mildly popular songs was that there was a section of the audience who didn't care about these under-the-hood details. To the casual listener, if it sounded fun, it was good music. As my homegrown bedroom experiments gained popularity, I noticed the experts sometimes claim what I and others like me were doing wasn't real music. Professional producers, classical musicians and people who played instruments would hint at the lack of any real skill in making music on a computer. Traditional DJs would say modern DJs are not actually, truly mixing music. "DJs just press play and pause" was a big meme, maybe it still is. It was similar to today's vibe-coding LLM discourse on what it means to actually program versus live-action-role-playing using an LLM. I never had too strong of an opinion on the methodologies of music production and thought what mattered was the output. I don't consider myself an expert musician, nor the perfect programmer. In both areas, I am simply tinkering and having fun. And fun along the way is (very) important.
My teenage music production experiences taught me something long-term useful: that criticisms are simply future problems waiting to be solved. The fact that CDs and MP3s were lossy and vinyls lossless; that a computer didn't contain human imperfections or tasteful aesthetics; that new technology is responsible for an artisanal downturn...are all parallel comments to what I hear about LLMs nowadays. Eventually, music could be streamed losslessly, the music mixing and production software got ridiculously better, even at mimicking human imperfections, and at some point in time, the newschoolers became the old schoolers criticizing the next new disruption using the same sounding arguments. History rhyming?
Criticisms aren't reasons to quit tinkering; they're pointers at problems to solve.
Fast forward, I tinkered about this morning and added an audio/video upload feature to this blog. It's very cool to me that I can type new features into existence. That's something I could've only dreamed of doing without LLMs. I'm uploading my first ever audio note below as an example, let's see if it works. Play/pause all over again?
Title inspired by this KRAZAM video. Love their work.
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