I think this goes a long way to explain why there is such a huge difference in opinion about the quality of AI-written code: Some people say LLMs write code far better than they could, and others say the code is always terrible and requires a great deal of fixing before it's acceptable. How can two different developers say those very different things about the same product?
It might be a tough pill to swallow, but if you think your LLM is producing better code than you could produce... well, I might have some bad news for you about your own skills.
But in the new environment of LLM-assisted coding, the LLM produces acceptable code so much faster than I can write it. Just taking time to understand and retool the LLM's output means an order of magnitude lower productivity and it doesn't feel like that's acceptable in this era.
Folks I know are landing 10+ PRs a day and nobody is reviewing anymore, and these are not companies that would have been skipping code review 2 years ago. The whole culture is turning against taking the time to comprehend and reason about our own work.
There is a wide range of code that will do the same job. 15s vs 2h for code 60% as good? 10 minutes for code 80% as good? 10 minutes today and 10 minutes tomorrow to fix something that is 30% as good?
A lot of people are going to draw that line in a different place and now that people can make that trade off you will quickly find they will and it probably wont fall where you would like it to.
At the end of the day a business pays you to produce value that will earn them money / customers. They don't pay you to write good code. Sometimes those two align and both sides are happy but they don't and often wont.
I wonder, given LLM's ability to "produce code faster" are they also producing value faster? I don't see it as an end user. Software is getting worse and worse, buggier and buggier, every release. I don't see it at my company either. We're producing massive quantities of code constantly, but still every project is on fire and every line of business is way behind schedule.
I don't know. Maybe.
Software might be getting worse but we are not far enough along yet for it to matter. Most people use less than 10 websites total, the internet has shrunk. It will take a while for it to be obvious in the other backend services that they dont know they use. People are really tolerant of buggy shit and some software has already been basically wiped out. Dev tooling is a blood bath right now, things like tailwind and all sorts of little CI tooling is fast disappearing. I wonder what happens to the open core stuff like elasticsearch / gitlab / redis where they gate some features in the enterprise offering that could probably be implemented by LLM pretty fast.
> We're producing massive quantities of code constantly, but still every project is on fire and every line of business is way behind schedule.
Right but did they start altering the schedule when AI entered the picture? We have barely just passed "tokens == productivity".
Also people tolerate quite a bit of buggy shit. Anthropic is down to two 9s (aha) and people still use them. There is a github ci failure post on here like every other day.