- having your job responsibilities being reduced to ONLY reviewing code.
- having to review code unnecessarily high scrutiny because it can hallucinate randomly and you as a human are responsible for the code even though you didn’t write it. In a traditional context when I review code, there’s a shared responsibility. Someone writes the code and another person reviews it. Now it’s entirely on the person who reviews it.
There may be other buckets, these are the ones that I hear often from other engineers.
They are also among more recent inventions, they are not "the traditional" programming at all. It is not like code review was the thing that attracted people to the profession or something that would be ore rewarding part of it.
I'm just upset that we are throwing away the original prompts for generated code in such a cavalier fashion.
An LLM prompt, even a huge one, is an incredibly vague document that leaves out most of the edge cases. And even Fable 5 happily ignores clear instructions in its prompt.
Now, to be fair, I absolutely expect the buggy slop to win, and to drive out the people that either write their own code or at least read the output. This will, in turn, make customers less willing to spend money on software after they get burnt a few times by buggy garbage. I think this is pretty much inevitable once Fable returns. It's just too damn good at long time horizon tasks, generating far more mostly sorta working code than any human could reasonably read.
How do you know your compiler is a rigurous and deterministic? Did you review all of its code?
LLMs are intentionally not deterministic, nor is their output subject to any known specification. Output is a point in a high dimensional manifold, determined by the input vector, but this manifold is unknowable in a real and intractable sense.
These are not equivalent constructions and it demeans you to conflate them.
...I agree it's not deterministic (neither are all your variations of C compilers, neither is Firefox v Safari v Chrome), but it probably Does Something(tm), and I might not want to peel back the covers and see how it used React, or Vue, VanillaJS, QT, or GTK.
It's upsetting that we are _committing the generated code_ rather than being able to use better and better optimizing compilers against the original prompt of: "make me a user registration form with database connection"
...I'm very with you on "it's not an accurate analogy", but I'm pointing out that there have been sea-changes already w.r.t. strict adherence to the generated code, or inclusion of left-pad v react libraries.
...and there have been corresponding productivity gains (debatable? ;-) when we've worked at these higher levels of abstraction.
I'm personally still in the "blacksmith" stage of working with AI output (put it back in the fire and beat on it a bunch more times), and shudder in horror at the thought of maintaining (or paying to maintain) megabytes of hours of token generation that looks like source code.
I'm hopeful that we'll eventually strip out some of the mud between the CPU and putting pixels on the screen (with the help of LLM's?), and that we'll still be able to understand and reason about the real "DAG" of what our programs are trying to do (eg: declarative guis, kindof like we have declarative sql), but there will always be a muddy middle part where the computer/complier/LLM is doing something in between that _is_ sufficiently reliable for us to ignore those bits most of the time.