| ▲ | calebkaiser 3 hours ago | |
I understand the distinction you're drawing, but in my experience, it gets a lot blurrier as a project evolves. Caveat that I use LLMs all day and have for quite some time, so I'm coming from a positive perspective. The danger for me in LLM code is the same as in writing, it's just that I'm not typically writing at the same scale as when I'm building something. The final piece when I'm writing is usually a message or a 1,000 word article at most. So I'm naturally going to analyze it quite intensely, because I can afford to. And I don't really use LLMs for this at all. I use them for things around writing (research, interrogating ideas, situationally specific stuff, mapping, visuals, publishing, etc.) And the code equivalent to an essay or message would probably be something like a single script, or the sort of thing I'd write as example code when I'm teaching. In those settings, again, LLMs can be helpful, but I'm still going to be really opinionated at a highly detailed resolution. But a codebase is more comparable to a novel than an essay. Or more directly, the writing in a codebase is usually the documentation, which grows commensurately with the codebase. And the real LLM risk here is the drift that can happen over the course of many epics or "chapters" as the LLM writes "code that works but is imprecise and probably shouldn't work this way" or introduces weird new terminology that neither of us can precisely define. Worse, this usually becomes obvious down the line, and I have to parse through the verbose constructed world the agent has created to trace the issue back. That's a big cognitive tax, because I'm holding these weird parallel worlds of "How did the LLM's alien brain get here within the bounds of the contracts" and "What do I really want this to look like". So I think it's fundamentally the same phenomenon, and we're all developing our skills around working with it in real time. | ||