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physicles | 1 month ago

> I see this response a lot but I think it's self-contradictory. Building faster, understanding faster, refactoring faster — these do allow skilled developers to work on bigger things. When it takes you one minute instead of an hour to find the answer to a question about how something works, of course that lets you build something more complex.

I partially agree. While LLMs don't magically increase a human's mental capacity, but they do allow a given human to explore the search space of e.g. abstractions faster than they otherwise could before they run out of time or patience.

But (to use GGP's metaphor) do LLMs increase the ultimate height of the software mountain at which complexity grinds everything to a halt?

To be more precise, this is point at which the cost of changing the system gets prohibitively high because any change you make will likely break something else. Progress becomes impossible.

Do current LLMs help us here? No, they don't. It's widely known that if you vibe code something, you'll pretty quickly hit a wall where any change you ask the LLM to make will break something else. To reliably make changes to a complex system, a human still needs to really grok what's going on.

Since the complexity ceiling is a function of human mental capacity, there are two ways to raise that ceiling:

1. Reduce cognitive load by building high-leverage abstractions and tools (e.g. compilers, SQL, HTTP)

2. Find a smarter person/machine to do the work (i.e. some future form of AI)

So while current LLMs might help us do #1 faster, they don't fundamentally alter the complexity landscape, not yet.

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