>In current coding models the transformer bit is just one part of what is really an expert system. The complete package includes things like highly curated training data, specialized tokenizers, pre and post training regimens, guardrails, optimized system prompts etc, all tuned to coding. Put it all together and you get one shot performance on generating the type of code that was unthinkable even a year ago.

This is lipstick on a pig. All those methods are impressive, but ultimately workarounds for an idea that is fundamentally unsuitable for programming.

>That's >90% of all code in the wild. Probably more.

Maybe, but not 90% of time spent on programming. Boilerplate is easy. It's the 20%/80% rule in action.

I don't deny these tools can be useful and save time - but they can't be left to their own devices. They need to be tightly controlled and given narrow scopes, with heavy oversight by an SME who knows what the code is supposed to be doing. "Design W module with X interface designed to do Y in Z way", keeping it as small as possible and reviewing it to hell and back. And keeping it accountable by making tests yourself. Never let it test itself, it simply cannot be trusted to do so.

LLMs are incredibly good at writing something that looks reasonable, but is complete nonsense. That's horrible from a code maintenance perspective.