[ChuckMcM]

I really reasonate with this post, I too appreciate "Good Code"(tm). In a discussion on another forum I had a person tell me that "Reading the code that coding agents produce is like reading the intermediate code that compilers produce, you don't do that because what you need to know is in the 'source.'"

I could certainly see the point they were trying to make, but pointed out that compilers produced code from abstract syntax trees, and the created abstract syntax trees by processing tokens that were defined by a grammar. Further, the same tokens in the same sequence would always produce the same abstract syntax tree. That is not the case with coding 'agents'. What they produce is, by definition, an approximation of a solution to the prompt as presented. I pointed out you could design a lot of things successfully just assuming that the value of 'pi' was 3. But when things had to fit together, they wouldn't.

We are entering a period where a phenomenal amount of machine code will be created that approximates the function desired. I happen to think it will be a time of many malfunctioning systems in interesting and sometimes dangerous ways.

[geraneum]

> you could design a lot of things successfully just assuming that the value of 'pi' was 3. But when things had to fit together, they wouldn't.

Apt analogy. I’m gonna steal it!

[CuriousSkeptic]

I like to think of it as the period when software engineering finally grows up to be a respected discipline with a body of actual theory