[mym1990]

LLMs would not be popular if "spending those few minutes doing it yourself" part was true. In actuality it can be hours, days, or weeks depending on the feature and your pickiness. Everyone acts as if they are the greatest developer and that these tools are subpar, the truth is that most developers are just average, just like most drivers are average but think of themselves as above average. All of the sudden everyone that was piecing together code off of stackoverflow with no idea how to build the damn thing is actually a someone who can understand large code bases and find bugs and write flawless code? Give me a break.

To the degree that those same people are now writing 10-100x more code...that is scary, but the doom and gloom is pretty tiring.

[blauditore]

The SO copy-pasting is actually quite accurate. The same folks are now just blindly generating code. That's why most software in the world is shit, and will continue to be in the future. There might just be more of it.

[mym1990]

There will most definitely be much more of it, maybe machines are doing this on purpose to increase dependency on them haha. Ultimately, wagging a finger at someone will have no outcome, allowing someone to make real mistakes while vibe coding will be a much better learning experience. Someone that drops a prod database using Claude will have a very lasting memory of that(not saying that should be the goal, critical thinking obviously matters A LOT). Cars didn't used to have seatbelts, a lot of people died, then they got seatbelts and now the world is a better place.

[germandiago]

The problem is maintenance and understanding code in the presence of bugs.

It looks very productive at first sight but when you start to find problems it is going to be a lot of fun on a production system.

Because basically you cannot study all the output that the LLM throws line by line if what you want is speed.

Which leaves reliability compromised.

Also, sometimes LLMs throw a lot of extra and unncessary code making things more barroquw than if you had sat down and thought a bit about the problem a bit.

Yes, you can deliver faster code with LLMs, maybe. But it is going to be good enough for maintenance and bug fixing?

I am not sure at all.

[written-beyond]

I never said anything against using LLMs. You're projecting.

Any engineer worth their weight will always try to avoid adding code. Any amount of code you add to a system, whether is written by you or a all knowing AI is a liability. If you spent a majority of your work day writing code it's understandable to want to rely heavily on LLMs.

Where I'd like for people to draw a line on is not knowing at all what the X thousand lines of code are doing.

In my career, I have never been in a situation where my problems could be a solved by piecing together code from SO. When I say "spend those few minutes doing it yourself" I am specifically talking about UI, but it does apply to other situations too.

For instance, if you had to change your UI layout to something specific. You could try to collect screenshots and articulate what you need to see changed. If you weren't clear enough that cycle of prompting with the AI would waste your time, you could've just made the change yourself.

There are many instances where the latter option is going to be faster and more accurate. This would only be possible if you had some idea of your code base.

When you've let an agent take full control of your codebase you will have to sink time into understanding it. Since clearly everyone is too busy for that you get stuck in a loop, the only way to make those "last 10%" changes is *only* via the agent.

[mym1990]

I didn't say anything about your beliefs in AI, my statement was general. You're projecting.

It is still possible to write code with AI AND educate yourself on what the codebase architecture is. Even better, you can educate yourself on good software engineering and architecture and build that into making better specs. You can understand what the code is doing by having good tests, observability, and actually seeing it work. But if you're after peeping what every character is doing, I am not going to stop you!