At least, I'm not aware of any actual reasons, backed by a proper theory.
On the other hand. I've noticed some persistent issues with code generated by agents, especially poorly supervised agents. If engineers become less vigilant, agents never get to the point of not needing supervision and juniors never pick up required skills, this could lead to real trouble.
Did business ever cared about this? Like ever?.. I've seen too many code bases with awful code by humans, now AI simply exacerbated the issue but this is nothing new in our field.
I just don't see how this is going to be a battle engineering departments can win. As long as AI is brining money to the business, they are not going to listen.
It seems they run into problems with larger concepts and general organization and need guidance at the moment but for a single code file they often do better then I would have.
This is trolling right?
I’m simply playing devil’s advocate, because engineers can believe one thing, but until employers believe it, it doesn’t matter much.
I’m also not convinced that the reality of LLMs will never catch up with what employers think they can do.
It may never happen, but it very well could.
Either way, I feel the days of employers being ok with handwriting code are limited.
In theory (never happens) the software will become feature complete and you only pay the LLM for security updates.
A rough proxy for this would be if they say contribute to the C++ standards process, which Google Microsoft nVidia do, and basically zero "normal" companies (say SaaS) do. It means they are investing in multi-decade maintenance of their codebase
It was/is a struggle to get them to recognize and balance tech dept, we must now push to balance cognitive dept as well.
Some employers will eventually get it as they have with tech dept. And those will be the ones we see succeed.
I feel like this is an odd thing to be reticent about. You're working for someone who doesn't care about you and, in this changing landscape, you're compartmentalizing that in order to determine how best to care for yourself. Logically, to care for yourself you'd need to find an environment in which your needs aren't being neglected.
When the bill for the latter lands with a heavy thud, moderation and common sense start to look like a pretty good idea.
Sure, but again, this assumes both that handwriting code sometimes outperforms LLMs, and also that your employer agrees with this.
I think it’s only a matter of time (again, if we’re not already there) before LLMs outperform handwritten code nearly all of the time.
And, even if that’s not the case, I’m pretty convinced nearly all employers believe this is true, whether it is or not.
So your employer only sees a “middle ground” as room for higher productivity.
Mostly I just want to skip forward to the point where we find out which track we're on, because until we know, I feel constantly tense.
Because to be honest, more and more it seems many businesses have no real purpose other than to act as a sort of adult daycare for otherwise useless people.
More like sweeping the dust under the rug for later. The initial productivity boost is massive but at the cost of massive upfront tech debt. Given that LLMs aren't as good at removing code as they are at generating it, this is a problem.
Which is why businesses, tech and otherwise, are falling apart constantly unless they achieve gigafuck scale status, at which point they're unkillable no matter how much of this cancer infests their management.
I don't know how we arrived at a social norm where it's just completely fine that leadership in massive companies is just absolutely useless at their jobs, but the firms that last another hundred years are going to be the ones that figure out how to fire them all.
How about moving up the stack?
I've been writing code for nearly 30 years, and I'm done.
Probably what you want to do is use it a lot when you first start a job to establish some productivity credence, then as you become ready to switch jobs, use it less and less until you're writing everything by hand and taking interviews.
Cooking a steak and then flushing it straight down the toilet outperforms all the slow and tedious business of eating and digesting it, too.
Why should I use an LLM to write code? It cannot do the job I want it to. It cannot type the code I've already written and it cannot generate correct code.
That would be more equivalent to writing the code and immediately deleting it.
Except this code is being deployed, and it is still (mostly) functional, at least functional enough to satisfy your employer (their “hunger” in your analogy).
> Why should I use an LLM to write code? It cannot do the job I want it to.
Because your employer is convinced that it can do the job they want it to (whether it does the job you want it to do is irrelevant, unless you're the employer, in which case 100% handwrite your code).
Bzzzt. Wrong. I don't give a fuck who's satisfied by my code. I only care about writing it.
> Because your employer is convinced that it can do the job they want it to
Bzzzt. Wrong. The code is incorrect because it is not precisely the code I would have written.
LLMs are useless to me because they don't solve the problem of actually typing the code I've written into a computer.
All that matters is whether they agree with you.
The only control you have over this is to either a) work for yourself, or b) keep looking until you find an employer that agrees with you.
My argument is that the number of employers that fall under (b) is shrinking.
That's great. Sucks to be them. I've doubled my prices and doubled my time estimates and I'm still turning work away.
The first thing I do when I'm asked to clean up the LLM slop is "rm -rf ." and start from scratch.
You will pay a fortune for this.
I mean in your case, you are not able to use LLMs effectively to build features, so you should type the code by hand.
However, upper management is excited about AI because it can push features quickly to production. Granted, they will be giant balls of slop but they don't care. As long as it works in the UI, they are happy.
If no one could get anything done with AI, there wouldn't be billions invested i n it.
I never write code sitting at a computer. Mostly I write it in the car, when I have no distractions. I just type it in when I'm sitting at the computer.
I've been using Claude as an experiment for some "fun" projects that I'm unlikely to release, just to see how it is.
The thing is, at least for the stuff where it's getting deep into the far edges of synthesizer firmware, disk image decoding, audio generation and the like, Claude is mostly just quoting my own github repositories back to me.
So, I guess I'm doing something right then, or maybe I'm doing it wrong.
They certainly don't today. Perhaps they will in the future, but based on the lack of improvement thus far it seems unlikely that they will get to this point. But whether or not they do improve to that point, the reality is that today, LLMs do not give you a productivity boost unless you give up on quality and just YOLO stuff the LLM gives you without actually checking it. And nobody should be willing to do the latter, because that is how you get software/infrastructure that doesn't actually work.