> Are you ok with having a codebase that is effectively a black box?

When was the last time you looked at the machine code your compiler was giving you? For me, doing embedded development on an architecture without a mature compiler the answer is last Friday but I expect that the vast majority of readers here never look at their machine code. We have abstraction layers that we've come to trust because they work in practice. To do our work we're dependent on the companies that develop our compilers where we can at least see the output, but also companies that make our CPUs which we couldn't debug without a huge amount of specialized equipment. So I expect that mostly people will be ok with it.

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kace91 2 days ago | parent [-]

>When was the last time you looked at the machine code your compiler was giving you?

You could rephrase that as “when was the last time your compiler didn’t work as expected?”. Never in my whole career in my case. Can we expect that level of reliability?

I’m not making the argument of “the LLM is not good enough”. that would brings us back to the boring dissuasion of “maybe it will be”.

The thing is that human langauge is ambiguous and subject to interpretation, so I think we will have occasionally wrong output even with perfect LLMs. That makes black box behavior dangerous.

	▲	Symmetry 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		We certainly can't expect that with LLMs now but neither could compiler users back in the 1970s. I do agree that we probably won't ever have them generating code without more back and forth where the LLM complains that its instructions were ambiguous and then testing afterwards.