> better-specified software

Code is the most precise specification we have for interfacing with computers.

Re. productivity, if LLM's are a genuine boost with 1/3 of the work, neutral 1/3 of the time, and actually worse 1/3 of the time, it's likely we aren't really seeing performance improvements as 1) people are using them for everything and b) we're still learning how to best use them.

So I expect over time we will see genuine performance improvements, but Amdahl's law dictates it won't be as much as some people and ceo's are expecting.

Bingo. Hopefully there are some business opportunities for us in that truth.

> because the time will just go into tests that wouldn't otherwise have been written

Writing tests to ensure a program is correct is the same problem as writing a correct program.

Evaluating conformance is a different category of concern from ensuring correctness. Tests are about conformance not correctness.

Ensuring correct programs is like cleaning in the sense that you can only push dirt around, you can't get rid of it.

You can push uncertainty around and but you can't eliminate it.

This is the point of Gödel's theorem. Shannon's information theory observes similar aspects for fidelity in communication.

As Douglas Adams noted: ultimately you've got to know where your towel is.