I don't think it's dead if you have a market which values high-quality, artisanal products.

Sure, artisanal code in itself isn't something inherently sellable but if you pride your program on being a quality product then it's still valuable for others:) AI is basically the new JavaScript in a way.It won't create the next Linux or the next SQLite by itself.

▲

hombre_fatal 17 hours ago | parent [-]

That's separate from LLM usage though.

By this point, if you care about a quality product, you should learn how to leverage LLMs for that like running automated audits for correctness and performance opportunities.

There isn't a market for "yeah there's a memory leak but I wrote it by hand."

▲

brabel 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yep! We run security reviews on our pull requests now and are shocked at how it stops a lot of vulnerabilities being shipped. We've had a couple of high score CVEs from the before-LLM times, and when the AI reviews the code that introduced the CVEs, it easily picks them up. We had 2 humans reviewing every PR, and both missed the issues. It's far too easy to miss security issues when you manually review them, but LLMs are exceptionally good at finding them. Unfortunately for me, I admit, I just can't get myself to push code anymore without an LLM checking my work (or writing much of it when I'm at work, I try to write code by hand in my own time to make sure I don't rust away, but at work there's no way to justify doing it the "slow" way anymore).

▲

Pannoniae 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Fair enough, but as things stand now, the usual LLM-assisted piece of software is usually also partly or wholly LLM-designed too. Not just implemented on a function level or a file level. And LLM design is usually called "slop" because it's nothing spectacular unless you bring fresh ideas to it from a human perspective.

Hand-written memory leaks don't have a market but hand-designed software with hand-designed UX and a hand-designed vision does :)

	▲	hombre_fatal 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm generally impressed with the code that Fable/Opus is writing for me these days; I would be proud to have had the same foresight had I implemented the solution myself. And Fable's architectural design is pretty much always well-reasoned and a good place to start. There's this idea that the best way to use LLMs is to be in the backseat constantly yelling out corrections, but that hasn't been true in my experience for quite some time, though I only use a few sota models. I think something being slop this late in the game is mainly a reflection of the person using it. I can't really blame AI anymore when pretty much any lever you'd recommend to de-slop it is one prompt away. I agree with your last bit, and that is the only thing left now that AI solved the technical part.