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| ▲ | solid_fuel 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Linus, like anyone else, has been wrong about things before, I'm not really interested in the appeal to authority here. Two simple facts: 1. Reading & understanding code takes longer than writing it the first time.
2. Caring about what you ship requires *understanding* what you ship.
Therefore Using LLMs to write code cannot save you time, because it takes longer to understand what it has written than it would to write it in the first place.
That leaves simple changes like refactorings as the main use of LLMs in responsible development. Hardly a massive accelerator. | | |
| ▲ | simonra 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Point 1 is dependent on the individual and often not the case. Especially in cases where the part that takes effort is figuring out the poorly documented syntax/api you’re stuck with for the task (extra fun with new components iterating rapidly and pinning the next version requires new scaffolding), you can read the invocation and the accompanying couple of lines of test code way faster than you’d mould them yourself. Which also translates neatly to point 2 (how efficiently can you in many cases ascertain the outcome of smearing the chosen bits on the cpu with easily digestible tests). Also the emotionally laden appeal to "responsibility" is weak, as it glosses over the many cases where overspending resources on creating the thing would be the irresponsible choice. | | |
| ▲ | solid_fuel 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Point 1 is dependent on the individual and often not the case. Not really. To properly understand code you must have a mental model of what it is doing. You need that model whether you are reading or writing the code. It is easier to build that model while writing the code than while simply reading it. To build the model while reading the code requires having the same understanding of the problem and the same approach already in mind, which is almost never the case for any moderately complex problem. > Especially in cases where the part that takes effort is figuring out the poorly documented syntax/api you’re stuck with for the task Reading LLM generated code does not avoid this, and in fact it is often worse since LLM comments are terrible at getting to the point. |
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| ▲ | LoganDark 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I'm not really interested in the appeal to authority here. Citing Linus isn't an appeal to authority, it's an example. A prominent example, but no one is saying to follow what he does or what he believes. |
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| ▲ | bigstrat2003 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Some people use AI to code and care what they ship. The vast, vast majority of people using LLMs to build software don't care at all about quality. I'll grant you Torvalds, but he's very much not the norm (and he's wrong: by the time you review the code the model wrote, you spent as much time reviewing it as you would've writing it, so no time was saved). |
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