This matches my experience. And I do mind the unnecessary comments. I always tell juniors that every line is important and the presence of a comment is a powerful tool for communicating with future developers. Think of it like labelling circuits on a fusebox. Now these garbage code generators are putting comments on everything because they don't understand anything and can't tell what it's redundant.

But this is only scratching the surface of what's wrong, as the article elaborates.

The thing is people claim these things are making them faster. I don't believe it. What I believe is they are faster at generating shit. I know that because a baby can coax an LLM into producing shit too.

I do not believe you can spend that much time writing the correct prompt - use this exact function, follow this pattern, add a comment here, don't add one there, no, not like that - and still be quicker than just writing it yourself directly in the language.

It's like if I speak French fluently but only communicate through a translator that I instruct in English but constantly have to correct when they miss the nuance in my speech. I'd just speak French!

So, no, I don't believe it.

What I believe is that many, many software developers have been manually writing boilerplate, repetitive and boring code over and over again up until this point. I believe it because I've seen it. LLMs will obviously speed this up. But some of us already learnt how to use the computer to do that for us.

What I also believe is developers exist who don't understand, or care to understand, what they are doing. They will code using a trial and error approach and find solutions based purely on perceived behaviour of the software. I believe it because I've seen it. Of course LLMs will speed up this process. But some of us actually think about what we're writing, just like we don't just randomly string together words in a restaurant and then just keep trying until we get the dish we want.