Even if the jury is still out, I would still say you are both right already.

The amount of slop produced even in company setting is staggering and I don't like it one bit that neither the submitter nor the reviewer of the PR paid due dilligence. And I am only complaining because it then becomes my problem. So, then I have to start nagging people to clean that up. I can say with 100% certainty that the problems I face now would not have happened without LLMs.

That said, used with care, with proper supervision, with dilligence to review what LLMs did, I still think they can be and are beneficial.

I think that we are just not used to getting results of questionable quality from the tools we use. So, I am hopeful that we will learn and it will improve with time but still find myself dreading the age of the vibe coder.

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unknownfuture an hour ago | parent [-]

Very well said.

I also think reading and reviewing code is a skill that connected to but very much independent of the writing of code, and the use of coding agents requires us to be far more skilled and diligent at it.

So put another way, people who were good at coding without agents may in fact be a poor fit with them, which means the entire industry is experiencing a dislocation between skills we have and skills we need, leading to extremely bimodal outcomes.

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prerok an hour ago | parent [-]

Indeed, however I would also point out that senior engineers have already been expected to be good at reading code: they were expected to evaluate the code quality of other contributors, so they had to be able to do that.

In fact, from my personal experience, going from junior to mid to senior, that was the hardest thing. Reading the code and thinking if what they did was really correct and will not have additional undesired side-effects was hard to become efficient at (it didn't help that we were working in C back then).

So, really, I think that for juniors it's actually much harder because if they want to do due dilligence they have to do the same evaluation but without the years of experience working with that code base. I can understand, even if I don't like it, that they just submit the output of the LLM for the senior to review.

	▲	unknownfuture 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Indeed, however I would also point out that senior engineers have already been expected to be good at reading code: they were expected to evaluate the code quality of other contributors, so they had to be able to do that. Yeah, but the frequency, volume, and complexity of that activity, and its ratio versus all the other work that a developer was previously expected to do, has shifted dramatically, not least because now we're having to review the output of our own coding agents as well as that of other developers on our teams. As a consequence, folks who were marginal but capable at that skill now likely find themselves working beyond their ability. > So, really, I think that for juniors it's actually much harder because if they want to do due dilligence they have to do the same evaluation but without the years of experience working with that code base. I can understand, even if I don't like it, that they just submit the output of the LLM for the senior to review. Yup, couldn't agree more.