:| I'm an engineer of 30+ years. I think I know good and bad quality. You can't "vibe code" good quality, you have to review the code. However it is like having a team of 20 Junior Engineers working. If you know how to steer a group of engineers, then you can create high quality code by reviewing the code. But sure, bury your head in the sand and don't learn how to use this incredibly powerful tool. I don't care. I just find it surprising that some people have such a myopic perspective.

It is really the same kind of thing.. but the model is "smarter" then a junior engineer usually. You can say something like "hmm.. I think an event bus makes sense here" Then the LLM will do it in 5 seconds. The problem is that there are certain behavioral biases that require active reminding (though I think some MCP integration work might resolve most of them, but this is just based on the current Claude Code and Opus/Sonnet 4 models)

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WD-42 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I use llms every day. They’ve made me slightly more productive, for sure. But these claims that they “are like 20 junior engineers” just don’t hold up. First off, did we already forget the mythical man month? Second, like I said, greenfield side projects are one thing. I could vibe code them all day. The large, legacy codebases at work? The ones that have real users and real consequences and real code reviewers? I’m sorry, but I just haven’t seen it work. I’ve seen no evidence that it’s working for anyone else either.

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throwawayoldie 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> They’ve made me slightly more productive, for sure

How are you measuring this? Are you actually saying that you _feel_ slightly more productive?

	▲	WD-42 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I guess I’m not measuring it, really. But I know that in the past I’d do a web search to find patterns or best practices, now the llm is pretty good at proving that kind of stuff. My stack overflow usage has gone way down, for example.

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twelve40 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> it is like having a team of 20 Junior Engineers

lol sounds like a true nightmare. Code is a liability. Faster junior coding = more crap code = more liability.

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alternatex 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I've never seen someone put having a high number of junior engineers in a positive light. Maybe with LLMs it's different? I've worked at companies where you would have one senior manage 3-5 juniors and the code was completely unmaintainable. I've done plenty of mentoring myself and producing quality code through other people's inexperienced hands has always been incredibly hard. I wince when I think about having to manage juniors that have access to LLMs, not to mention just LLMs themselves.

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XenophileJKO 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Ah.. now you are asking the right questions. If you can't handle 3-5 junior engineers.. then yes, you likely can't get 10-20x speed from an LLM.

However if you can quickly read code, see and succintly communicate the more optimal solution, you can easily 10x-20x your ability to code.

I'm begining to believe it may primarily come down to having the vocabulary and linguistic ability to succintly and clearly state the gaps in the code.

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fzeroracer 17 hours ago | parent [-]

> However if you can quickly read code, see and succintly communicate the more optimal solution, you can easily 10x-20x your ability to code.

Do you believe you've managed to solve the most common wisdom in the software engineering industry? That reading code is much harder than writing it? If you have, then you should write up a white paper for the rest of us to follow.

Because every time I've seen someone say this, it's from someone that doesn't actually read the code they're reviewing.

	▲	XenophileJKO 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Harder maybe, slower.. no.

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pron 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> However it is like having a team of 20 Junior Engineers working. If you know how to steer a group of engineers, then you can create high quality code by reviewing the code.

You cannot effectively employ a team of twenty junior developers if you have to review all of their code (unless you have like seven senior developers, too).

But this isn't a point that needs to be debated. If it is true that LLMs can be as effective as a team of 20 junior developers, then we should be seeing many people quickly producing software that previously required 20 junior devs.

> but the model is "smarter" then a junior engineer usually

And it is also usually worse than interns in some crucial respects. For example, you cannot trust the models to reliably tell you what you need to know such as difficulties they've encountered or important insights they've learnt and understand they're important to communicate.

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OccamsMirror 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's definitely made me more productive for admin tasks and things that I wouldn't bother scripting if I had to write it myself. Having an LLM pump out busy work like that is definitely a game changer.

When I point it at my projects though, the outcomes are much less reliable and often quite frustrating.

	▲	liveoneggs 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html