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by clarionbell6 hours ago |
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upvoteby swat5356 hours ago|
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> long term maintainability

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.

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upvoteby mythrwy5 hours ago|
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LLMs aren't perfect and they have problems, but often they write better code than humans. At least this human.

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.

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upvoteby bigstrat20035 hours ago|
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If an LLM writes better code than you, that says more about you than anything else (either your ability to write code or your ability to evaluate LLMs). The code they write is garbage.
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upvoteby bonzini5 hours ago|
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They write garbage if you turn off your brain. They write code as good as yours if you work together.
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upvoteby noisy_boy4 hours ago|
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I broadly agree with you about improving quality through working together. But even with tons of discussion, they still write code that seems fine from a distance but is weird when you actually get down to actually reading it and thinking about it, line by line. It is not junk but sure as hell I can write tighter and cleaner code and I am a very mediocre programmer. The abundance and frequency of "what, why?!" and "why not just..." reactions I have at LLM code throughout the day has made that much clear to me.
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upvoteby munksbeer4 hours ago|
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> The code they write is garbage.

This is trolling right?

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upvoteby recursive1 hours ago|
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No. Sometimes they produce code that's ok in small units, but definitely not all the time.
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upvoteby jader2016 hours ago|
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I agree with everything you said.

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.

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upvoteby SoftTalker6 hours ago|
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The complexity of code is combinatorial. Code is harder to understand than it is to create. The LLMs will be creating code that they will not (nor will any human) be able to understand later, or it won't be the same understanding that was used to create it. We'll find that systems that were created with LLM code will be impossible for LLMs to contextualize, or will be cost-prohibitive to do so.
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upvoteby axus5 hours ago|
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The wages for the LLM will increase as the codebase gets larger, the only inhibitor is how fast customers are willing to pay for new features. I don't think that cost ever goes higher than human wages for maintainable software.

In theory (never happens) the software will become feature complete and you only pay the LLM for security updates.

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upvoteby iwontberude6 hours ago|
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It's a moot point. In Mag7 companies internal code gets thrown away within 2 years on average because of contract negotiations, new opensource projects that obviate need for the internal codebase, license changes, layoffs, etc, etc. We don't need long term maintainability because its already on its way to the garbage bin. Frankly it's always been this way.
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upvoteby chubot6 hours ago|
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Its' the exact opposite ... Google, nVidia, Amazon, Apple, etc. all have a deep bench of code that is a moat. They have lots of throwaway code too, but those companies are precisely the ones that pay attention to code quality, and comprehensibility by experts

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

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upvoteby SoftTalker5 hours ago|
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"Contribute" is an interesting word, since those companies are so big they can just dictate the standards they prefer. Also they are so big and have so much cash pouring in that they can afford to pay employees with nothing better to do than spend time drafting C++ standards. The average normal SaaS company is hoping they can make payroll next month.
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upvoteby tumdum_5 hours ago|
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Is google still a big contributor to the c++ standard? I thought they are far less involved than a decade ago.
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upvoteby iwontberude5 hours ago|
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I’m talking back of house, you’ve sort of mistakenly missed my point and made a rebuttal to some completely different question and I agree with you.
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