This aligns with my thoughts on a recent post here about code being "clay" now (as opposed to stone, which must be chiseled with great effort, skill, and time expenditure). Clay is much easier to work with and mold to our desired shape.

My point was, you still didn't build infrastructure out of great lumps of clay. You don't slap down some clay in the middle of a stream and vibe-build a bridge. Infrastructure was still built of stone. Or, if clay, out of individual bricks.

Similarly, LLM-generated code should be used to build discrete bricks of code that can be read, tested, and most importantly, understood. Then you take those bricks and architect and engineer your application with them. This is how you build a platform that can survive actual use.

You can make a model of a bridge with the clay...but the actual bridge is an entirely different pursuit. This is a discipline we need to develop as engineers, since LLM-generated code won't go away. It can be used to make bricks faster but we have to make the engineering decisions that create reliable, secure applications.

I generally agree but it starts to get interesting again once you have the first solid bricks in place. The LLM is incredibly good at seeing where you are going. You can place one brick and the next few become obvious.

I've been working on a project for the last 18 months, and over that time LLMs have advanced to the point where they've become useful. I can write a section of UI and ask the LLM to write all the front end and backend services. There are enough examples that it writes exactly the code I would have written myself. It can build entire sections of code quickly and efficiently because there aren't very many questions without an answer somewhere in the codebase, which it is very good at finding. If it finds any gaps, it can raise it as a question. It analyzes, asks questions, and then completes the work.

The impression that I'm starting to form is that you do not want to use AI very much early in a project, except to ask questions and check your code. But it's usefulness at assisting with code scales with the size of the project.

But infrastructure is actually made out of concrete, which can be poured almost like water into any mold you can fashion to hold it, and it then hardens into something stone-like.