Not a fan of the article even though I somewhat agree with the title depending on your definition of coding.

AI can write CRUD API endpoints almost perfectly now. It can also write quicksort, a heap, whatever much quicker than I can.

It really sucks at designing types and apis though and when it creates types and apis it doesn't think or plan for the future way the system will evolve (even if it's known up front how the system will evolve).

I suspect this will remain a problem for the models for a long time. All the things that the models are currently good at are the low hanging fruit of reinforcement learning for coding.

Think about the kind of reinforcement learning environment that needs to be created to train a model to become good at building and designing large scale software end to end. It would be a slog because you need to build the large scale software up front and then break it down to train the model to construct it in a systematic manner that allows for the software to evolve. And then you need enough of these training environments for it to generalize. I think they will eventually figure it out though but it may take a while.

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nemo44x 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> It really sucks at designing types and apis though and when it creates types and apis it doesn't think or plan for the future way the system will evolve (even if it's known up front how the system will evolve).

Does that really matter? Those are things so that humans can better understand and extend a code base. That mattered when writing code was expensive and took time.

Now if it can pass all the tests it’s fine. If there’s an issue just have it rewrite things immediately. New bug? Generate a new test and rewrite code.

All, or many, of the old things that mattered just sort of don’t anymore.

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vmg12 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It does, LLMs are almost like electrical current in that they take the fastest path to completing the immediate goal and it takes you to a local optima instead of a global one. Your app will be worse and lower quality. It will introduce subtle bugs that you could have made impossible from the beginning.

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nemo44x 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you’re just imagining things. Our teams have exclusively used LLMs for coding for 6 months. Literally 0 lines written by hand. 100% more PRs than a year ago and code quality is as high due to thousands of tests.

Much of the code needs to be performant and the LLM knows this and grinds on it. Less and less human inspection is needed.

I think 90% of software can be written like this today.

	▲	vmg12 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I use LLM assisted coding a lot, we might just be building different kinds of software.

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mxey 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Who writes those tests and makes sure they test the right thing and everything?

	▲	nemo44x 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The LLM. And you can use an alternate LLM to antagonize the coding LLM. You’re simply testing outputs. Make a spec but ultimately ungodly amounts of tests can be built quickly to ensure the program is outputting the right things.