Humans could already produce more code than a human can understand. Even a single human in the pre-agentic era could produce more code than they could understand, certainly over a career and often even in the short term given the resources many companies give to maintenance.
replyA lot of old-school software engineering is about how to deal with this reality.
No they couldn't. You can't create software you don't understand because you wouldn't even know what to type into the IDE in the first place. I don't understand claims like these, how exactly are people especially individuals producing more code than they could understand? Even at a huge corporation one might not understand all the code but surely they understand the part they're modifying because otherwise they wouldnt know how to modify it.
replyI want to make better software, not more software. Making software development faster isn't necessarily the goal. Making it better in the many, many ways that matter (of which speed is just one part) is.
replyThere is more software to be written than there were programmers so lots of people do indeed want more software, for example small tools and one off projects that aren't worthwhile to make pre LLM.
replyA human can produce far more code than a human can understand, too, but pre-LLM we always viewed someone overwhelming their colleagues like that as being bad at their job.
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