> I sincerely don’t understand what the people who say they no longer read any code are doing

Welcome to the present.

Like many of us do not read the machine code generated by a C++ compiler, the code generated by an agent is similarly irrelevant and disposable, by now.

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croon an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The machine code generated by a compiler is deterministic and reproducible (assuming using same chain/tool versions), which is why reading the human readable pre-compiled source is sufficient.

Reading a prompt but not reading the non-deterministic/non-reproducible LLM output is not comparable.

How do you know it does what you want it to do without reading it? Tests? How do you know what they test? Yes, clicking a button in a browser and getting the result you want satisfies most, but that only works on the most basic systems. Once a code base grows large enough, any one agent reading in its context wont understand the whole, and if no human does either, it becomes unworkable.

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Good4boothee an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How does handling support tickets/bugs work with such approach? If LLM sometimes can't handle it - do I have to beg it to keep trying, as humans are no longer an viable fallback?

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trashymctrash 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That’s a huge overstatement. If that were true, then banks would code their core financial services with that approach but they don’t.

	▲	nnevatie an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Is it though? I see this occurring every day in a number of projects I have visibility to. Isn't this exactly why OS projects are over-burdened by the firehose of contributions? The maintainers will want to read the code contributions, while those up-to-date with the latest models/agents/tools already trust their output to be above the average developer's (whatever that means in practice).

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casid 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What‘s relevant then? We still put the code in version control, not the shitty prompts that made it.

	▲	nnevatie an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Correct, but I increasingly find that the version control is just a storage for code and a place to trigger CI/CD from. Edit: ...and that the source code is useful in retaining enough context of the problem being solved. So, most people will not store the prompts, trusting that the source code provides context for the next iteration.