[totalperspectiv]

I think you hit the nail on the head with the mental model part. I really like this method of thinking about programming "Programming as Theory Building" https://gist.github.com/onlurking/fc5c81d18cfce9ff81bc968a7f...

I don't mind when other programmers use AI, and use it myself. What I mind is the abdication of responsibility for the code or result. I don't think that we should be issuing a disclaimer when we use AI any more than when I used grep to do the log search. If we use it, we own the result of it as a tool and need to treat it as such. Extra important for generated code.

[skeeter2020]

Isn't this what Brooks describes, stating more than 50 years ago that there's a fundamental shift when a system can no longer be held in a single mind, and the communication & coordination load that results from adding people? It seems with a single person offloading the work to an LLM right at the start they give up this efficiency before even beginning, so unless you're getting AI to do all the work it will eventually bite you...

[transpute]

Indeed. Speedrunning an LLM variation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law.

  Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

  — Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?

> there's a fundamental shift when a system can no longer be held in a single mind

Should LLM users invest in both biological (e.g. memory palace) and silicon memory caches?

[zeta0134]

Even putting aside the ethical issues, it's rare that I want to copy/paste code that I find into my own project without doing a thorough review of it. Typically if I'm working off some example I've found, I will hand-type it in my project's established coding style and add comments to clarify things that are not obvious to me in that moment. With an LLM's output, I think I would have to adopt a similar workflow, and right now that feels slower than just solving the problem myself. I already have the project's domain in my mental map, and explaining it to the agent is tedious and a time waste.

I think this is often overlooked, because on the one hand it's really impressive what the predictive model can sometimes do. Maybe it's super handy as an autocomplete, or an exploration, or for rapidly building a prototype? But for real codebases, the code itself isn't the important part. What matters is documenting the business logic and setting it up for efficient maintenance by all stakeholders in the project. That's the actual task, right there. I spend more time writing documentation and unit tests to validate that business logic than I do actually writing the code that will pass those tests, and a lot of that time is specifically spent coordinating with my peers to make sure I understand those requirements, that they were specified correctly, that the customer will be satisfied with the solution... all stuff an LLM isn't really able to replace.

[bwfan123]

Thanks for sharing this beautiful essay which I have never come across. The essay and its citations are thought-provoking reading.

IMO, LLMs of today are not capable of building theories (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44427757#44435126). And, if we view programming as theory building, then LLMs are really not capable of coding. They will remain useful tools.

[swat535]

LLMS are great at generating scaffolding and boilerplate code which then I can iterate upon. I'm not going write

describe User do ... it ".."

for the thousand time.. or write the controller files with CRUD actions..

LLMS can do these. I can then review the code, improve it and go from there.

They are also very useful for brain storming ideas, I treat it as a better google search. If I'm stuck trying to model my data, I can ask it questions and it gives me recommendations. I can then think about it and come up with an approach that makes sense.

I also noticed that LLMs really lack basic comprehension. For example, no matter how many times you provide the Schema file for it (or a part of it) , it still doesn't understand that a column doesn't exist on a model and will try to shove it in the suggested code.. very annoying.

All that being said, I have an issue with "vibe coding".. this is where the chaos happens as you blindly copy and paste everything and git push goodbye

[lenkite]

We need to invent better languages and frameworks. Boilerplate code should be extremely minimal in the first place, but it appears to have exploded in the last decade.

[exe34]

If you need to do something for a thousand times, why don't you write a template?