You’re technically correct, but the vast majority of software has never been built to the kinds of standards you are describing. LLMs are not displacing that kind of work!

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boomlinde 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The person they responded to refers specifically to "healthcare, finance, automotive, defense, power plans, aviation, manufacturing", areas where I'd at least hope that we aspire to understand what the code does.

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Maxatar 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I worked briefly in heath care and the code is so brittle and so poorly understood that almost everyone is afraid to touch anything and instead it's just layers and layers of stuff trying to patch around existing code.

	▲	mwwaters 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I know this is true. But I don’t think “Some parts of important codebases are black boxes. Therefore it’s fine if all of that code base becomes a far bigger black box” sounds like a good argument. Also, there was probably some human at some point that had some understanding of what they were trying to do and why. The black boxes generally get programmed around after they long left but at the time they had bugs ironed out over decades. (Yes I know sometimes true slop is done over a short period of time and the programmer leaves. But I’ve generally seen the black box built over decades instead).

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

Having worked in software for healthcare, defense and finance I guarantee you we don't

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2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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ffsm8 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

yeah, the llm approach is incredibly wasteful wrt pretty much everything. Performance, RAM, Development (Tokens).

But it does give you surprisingly stasble rube-goldberg machines.

And thats basically what 95-99% of enterprises want from their software.

It annoyed me to no end when i began my career, but at this point ive accepted it and can definitely still have fun developing software with llms. As a matter of fact, as my perfectionism approach to software in my earlier years was never really appreciated... So i dont really mind the new MO.

I still occasionally hand write though, esp. at the dayjob where ive got super small token budgets while continuously being told to use more AI. But that's normal, employers usually give off bipolar vibes with multiple stakeholders wanting to advance each of their bonus package KPI of any given quarter

	▲	jonahx 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> yeah, the llm approach is incredibly wasteful wrt pretty much everything. Everything except what matters most: human time.

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skydhash 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The vast majority of software is not that important. I don’t really care about easytag (which I use for flac metadata), but I do care about xterm and tmux.