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I’ll be ok, I produce higher quality work than any LLM ever will. And if that time ever comes, which I seriously doubt, it’s not like it’s that hard to prompt.

LLMs will hallucinate edge cases or worry about things that just aren’t possible within context. It results in more tests than are needed. I personally dont think LLMs are any good at all.

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I can’t believe I’m writing this comment.

A month ago I was still talking like you. Then I said to an insisting colleague, “watch I’ll try to vibe code a game engine and show you the crap it produces.”

Granted, this wasn’t my first game engine so I knew exactly what to say, but I was completely floored. GPT Sol & Astra at max effort was flawless at nearly everything I threw at it. I’m talking fully ground up, zero dependencies, just the primitives and SIMD. Fully featured engine done in two weeks with deferred 2-stage render pipeline, shadow maps, mesh shaders, MSAA, post processing, collision, physics, the works.

I even intentionally skipped a few important optimizations and went back to refactor them in, thinking there’s no way it can do a wholesale rewrite of major systems, but it did it. I got dry mouth from all the jaw dropping. My prompts got shorter and more ambiguous, so it would ask me clarify. I audited every line of code, and it was good (after adding two skills.md). I gave up. I’m a reluctant believer.

It sucks, but sadly these things are really good. Don’t be last contrarian, there’s nothing to gain. You’re just lying to yourself

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I think this is the part that stumps me. I've done similar things, I'm not math heavy but "vibecoded" a full physics simulator. It wasn't 100%, but it was 90% or 95%. Wild!

But I dropped it and will probably never touch it again.

Are you going to do anything with that game engine? I'm sure there are thousands of others who've written a game engine with the tools. What are they being used for? Is it just to "try it out"? I see people producing a LOT of software. Sure, the code is good, but was it needed? Are people using it?

And maybe that's OK - we're just writing software for ourselves now, because it's so cheap + fast to produce.

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> Are you going to do anything with that game engine? I'm sure there are thousands of others who've written a game engine with the tools. What are they being used for? Is it just to "try it out"? I see people producing a LOT of software. Sure, the code is good, but was it needed? Are people using it?

You can ask the same about hand written code too.

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Have you tried creating something that doesnt have HUNDREDS of existing implementations on the Web already?
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Maybe I’m just better than you? It’s something to consider. Your whole point here is that astra could pump out something faster than you ever could at a quality level _you_ think is good. It might be worth some reflection that _your quality level_ is not _my quality level_.

I have no pressure to use this stuff. I’m still getting paid. I’m still shipping higher quality software at the same speed as the rest of my peers. Why should I sacrifice quality for speed?

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I'm quite curious to know what kind of systems / software do you work on?
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> LLMs can write more tests

In fact, sometimes LLMs write too many tests to the point it significantly slows down your test runs and CI!

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Too many tests and hallucinates edge cases and “security” flaws.
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Good point. Might be good on a weekly basis to purge / look for stale and unnecessary tests.
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Shouldn’t that be caught at review time? Or by the sad little ai driver that submits the pr? ;)
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I had that issue so I told it to refactor the tests to a smaller more concentrated significant set.
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And yet LLMs still seem to write the same kind of crap brittle mock-the-world tests that average developers do, drives me nuts.
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Of course. LLMs only produce the average. Most of the time if you think you need to mock you should probably just do the real thing. It’s mostly an antipattern.
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