This. I find bringing in the LLM when there is a good structure already in place is better. I also use it sparingly, asking it for very specific things. Write me tests for this, or create me a function that does this or that. Review this, extend that etc.

The SO copy-pasting is actually quite accurate. The same folks are now just blindly generating code. That's why most software in the world is shit, and will continue to be in the future. There might just be more of it.

I never said anything against using LLMs. You're projecting.

Any engineer worth their weight will always try to avoid adding code. Any amount of code you add to a system, whether is written by you or a all knowing AI is a liability. If you spent a majority of your work day writing code it's understandable to want to rely heavily on LLMs.

Where I'd like for people to draw a line on is not knowing at all what the X thousand lines of code are doing.

In my career, I have never been in a situation where my problems could be a solved by piecing together code from SO. When I say "spend those few minutes doing it yourself" I am specifically talking about UI, but it does apply to other situations too.

For instance, if you had to change your UI layout to something specific. You could try to collect screenshots and articulate what you need to see changed. If you weren't clear enough that cycle of prompting with the AI would waste your time, you could've just made the change yourself.

There are many instances where the latter option is going to be faster and more accurate. This would only be possible if you had some idea of your code base.

When you've let an agent take full control of your codebase you will have to sink time into understanding it. Since clearly everyone is too busy for that you get stuck in a loop, the only way to make those "last 10%" changes is *only* via the agent.

Writing the spec is becoming the default for pet projects. Which would be a good thing if the spec wasn't also partly written by an LLM.

You can already see people running into these issues, they have a spec in mind. They work on the spec with and LLM, the spec has stuff added to it that wasn't what they were expecting.

And again, I am not against LLMs but I can be against how they're being used. You write some stuff down, maybe have the LLM scaffold some skeleton for you. You could even discuss with the LLM what classes should be named what should they do etc. just be in the process so the entire code base isn't 200% foreign to you by the time it's done.

Also I am no one's mother, everyone has freewill they can do whatever they'd like. If you don't think you have better things to do than to produce 3-5 pieces of abandonware software every weekend then good for you.

I loved learning Computer Engineering in college because it de-mystified the black box that was the PC I used growing up. I learned how it worked holistically, from physics to logic gates to processing units to kernels/operating systems to networking/applications.

It's sad to think we may be going backwards and introducing more black boxes, our own apps.

I assume he’s mostly joking but… how often do you look at the assembly of your code?

To the AI optimist, the idea of reading code line by line will see as antiquated as perusing CPU registers line by line. Something do when needed, but typically can just trust your tooling to do the right thing.

I wouldn’t say I am in that camp, but that’s one thought on the matter. That natural language becomes “the code” and the actual code becomes “machine language”.

Honestly I'm not so strongly opiniated now as I was a few weeks ago. I'm in a huge questioning phase about my work/craft/hobby.

I've worked places where junior made bad code that was accepted because the QA tests were ok.

I even had a situation in production where we had memory leaks because nobody tried to use it for more than 20 minutes when we knew that the app is used 24/7.

We aim for 99% quality when no-one wants it. No-one wants to pay for it.

Github is down to one 9 and I haven't heard them losing many clients, people just cope.

We've reached a level where we have so much ram that we find garbage collection and immutability normal, even desired.

We are wasting bandwidth by using json instead of binary because it's easier to read when have to debug, because it's easier to debug while running than to think before coding.