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▲ patrickdavey 2 hours ago

"Tbf, it's worth pointing that many large legacy systems already work like that (sort of), with "Claude" replaced by "whoever happens to be maintaining it this year".

The real difference as I see it is that in the human maintained old style system, the human would take things slowly and ensure they understand any changes. Claude let loose will just say "yes, I know how to do this" and bork the system, because it doesn't have a concept of humbleness in the face of complexity!

▲daveguy 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Not only that, when you have a human designed and implemented system you know it's at least coherent enough that someone understood it at some point well enough to take responsibility for it. No such assurance with the llms.

▲SR2Z an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I am not sure that "someone understood it well enough to take responsibility" means what you think it means. I have definitely come across old systems which have had addons bolted on to them in so many places that the overall behavior of the system is unpredictable and only mostly works.

▲csallen an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But is this really a problem? If you have testing and you have version control via Git, you can roll back changes and investigate them.

I also don't even know if it's really true. Sure, maybe it's not coherent enough that a person understands it, but if an LLM wrote it, you can be ~99% certain (in my experience) that that LLM will understand it, and usually in less than the time it took to write it. And unlike humans, the LLMs don't die and take their knowledge with them, or change companies, or get ornery when you ask them to explain.

Also, in my experience, Claude doesn't really do what the parent is saying and dive head-first into complex problems and bork your code. It is fairly humble in the face of complexity. It constantly recommends breaking down larger problems into smaller ones that are more easy to grok.

But most importantly, anyone who's a decently skilled software engineer and who's using LLMs to write code is going to be thoughtful. Especially when they're writing code that's important. Unless you're an AI researcher pushing the bounds of what LLMs can do, which let's face it, the vast majority of programmers are not, it's almost always the case that you'll have your LLM writing intelligible code that you can understand and have it explain easily enough.

▲antihipocrat an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I'd like that to be true, but many software service startups were stitching together node packages and selling the result long before LLMs became useful.