> I find that I can obsessively breathe down the neck of an LLM for far longer than I could ever stay in the traditional flow state.

I can do that too. Most programmers can.

That's because it requires less skill! Critiquing something is always easier than doing it.

I can literally keep an LLM fixing things forever by just saying things like "This is not scalable", or "this is not maintainable", or "this is not flexible" or "this is not robust", ... etc ad nausem.

That doesn't take skill at the level to actually write the software. For the market which is hoping to switch to mostly LLM coding, the prize they are eyeing is skill devaluation and not just, as many think, productivity gains.

They have no reason to double output, but they'd sure love to first halve the people employed, and then halve the salaries of those people (supply/demand + a glut of programmers in the market), and then halve salaries again because almost no skill necessary...

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bradleyjg 6 hours ago | parent [-]

That's because it requires less skill! Critiquing something is always easier than doing it.

No, it was always the other way around. Mediocre programmers always wanted to rewrite everything because reading and understanding an existing codebase was always harder than writing some greenfield thing with a “modern language” or “modern libraries” or “modern idioms.” So they’d go and do that and end up with 100x the bugs.

	▲	lelanthran 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Mediocre programmers always wanted to rewrite everything You are comparing writing something with rewriting something. You don't know what the difference is?
	▲	layer8 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		How is that “no” and “the other way around”? The desire to rewrite comes from the ease with which one can critique existing code for being “too hard” to understand.
	▲	ffsm8 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You can't generalize that statement. There is a very valid reason why the Creator of erlang back in the day said something along the line of "you need to iteratively remake your software, improving it each time" As your knowledge about a topic grows, your initial mistaken implementation may become more and more obvious, and it may even mean a full rewrite. But yes, a person which instantly says "rewrite" before they understood the software is likely very inexperienced and has only worked with greenfield projects with few contributers (likely only themselves) before.