[crystal_revenge]

> not suitable for anywhere near production

This is what I've been increasingly understanding is the wrong way to understand how LLMs are changing things.

I fully agree that LLMs are not suitable for creating production code. But the bigger question you need to ask is 'why do we need production code?' (and to be clear, there are and always will be cases where this is true, just increasingly less of them)

The entire paradigm of modern software engineering is fairly new. I mean it wasn't until the invention of the programmable microprocessor that we even had the concept of software and that was less than 100 years ago. Even if you go back to the 80s, a lot of software doesn't need to be distributed or serve a endless variety of users. I've been reading a lot of old Common Lisp books recently and it's fascinating how often you're really programming lisp for you and your experiments. But since the advent of the web and scaling software to many users with diverse needs we've increasingly needed to maintain systems that have all the assumed properties of "production" software.

Scalable, robust, adaptable software is only a requirement because it was previously infeasible for individuals to build non-trivial systems for solving any more than a one or two personal problems. Even software engineers couldn't write their own text editor and still have enough time to also write software.

All of the standard requirements of good software exist for reasons that are increasingly becoming less relevant. You shouldn't rely on agents/LLMs to write production code, but you also should increasingly question "do I need production code?"

[munksbeer]

This is a very interesting aspect. I've been thinking along these lines.

Consider design patterns, or clean code, or patterns for software development, or any other system that people use to write their code, and reviewers use to review the code. What are they actually for? This question is going to seem bizarre to most programmers at first, because it is so ingrained in us, that we almost forget why we have those patterns.

The entire point is to ensure the code is maintainable. In order to maintain it, we must easily understand it, and and be sure we're not breaking something when we do. That is what design patterns solve, making easier to understand and more maintainable.

So, I can imagine a future where the definition of "production code" changes.

[varispeed]

> Scalable, robust, adaptable software is only a requirement because it was previously infeasible for individuals to build non-trivial systems for solving any more than a one or two personal problems. Even software engineers couldn't write their own text editor and still have enough time to also write software.

That's a wild assumption. I personally know engineers who _alone_ wrote things like compilers, emulators, editors, complex games and management systems for factories, robots. That was before internet was widely available and they had to use physical books to learn.

[embedding-shape]

Yeah, that jumped out from me too. Plenty of hackers could write their own text editor + have time to be professional developers to do other things. How do people think most of FOSS actually happened 15-20 years ago? Most of us were hacking on stuff in our free-time, but still having day jobs.

[bspinner]

In terms of security: yes, everyone needs production code.

[e12e]

In my mind, "yolo ai" application (throwaway code on one hand, unrestrained assistants on the other) - is a little like better spreadsheets and smart documents were in the 90s; just run macros! Everywhere! No need for developers - just Word an macros!

Then came macro viri - and practically - everyone cut back hard on distributing code via Word and Excel (in favour of web apps and we got the dot.com bubble).