Code, Cucumbers, and LLMs

Once upon a time I was standing in a hotel lobby waiting to check out when an obviously travel-weary person in a suit walked right past the line to the front counter and said (very politely), “Excuse me, but is this the Hilton Chicago or the Hilton Miami?” We were in fact in Toronto, but looking around, I understood their confusion: other than a few items in the gift shop, there was nothing visible that would have answered their question. I think about that sometimes when I’m on video calls.

What brought it to mind, though, was looking at some computer-generated code (old school wizard-style generation, not LLM, but I don’t think that matters). I don’t know how to express this properly—it could just be the COVID talking—but there’s no sense of “place” in the code, no feeling of “you are here”, which I didn’t even realize I had when reading code until it was absent.

That makes me remember the first time I had a cucumber that actually tasted like something. I’d grown up with grocery story cucumbers that were basically chewable water, and then I had one out of someone’s garden and I thought, “Cucumbers have flavor!” I almost felt betrayed: why hadn’t I known? Who had kept this from me, and why? And I wonder now, will people growing up with LLM-generated code and LLM-recycled explanations feel the same way if they ever stumble across something written by a human being?