The best part is that AI-driven systems are fine with running even more tight loops than what a sane human would tolerate.
Eg. running full linting, testing and E2E/simulation suite after any minor change. Or generating 4 versions of PR for the same task so that the human could just pick the best one.
That sounds awful. A truly terrible and demotivating way to work and produce anything of real quality. Why are we doing this to ourselves and embracing it?
A few years ago, it would have been seen as a joke to say “the future of software development will be to have a million monkey interns banging on one million keyboards and submit a million PRs, then choose one”. Today, it’s lauded as a brilliant business and cost-saving idea.
We’re beyond doomed. The first major catastrophe caused by sloppy AI code can’t come soon enough. The sooner it happens, the better chance we have to self-correct.
Does anybody really want to be an assembly line QA reviewer for an automated code factory? Sounds like shit.
Also I can’t really imagine that in the first place. At my current job, each task is like 95% understanding all the little bits, and then 5% writing the code. If you’re reviewing PRs from a bot all day, you’ll still need to understand all the bits before you accept it. So how much time is that really gonna save?
On the other hand, does anyone really wanna be a code-monkey implementing CRUD applications over and over by following product specifications by "product managers" that barely seem to understand the product they're "managing"?
See, we can make bad faith arguments both ways, but what's the point?
I have a feeling that devs who love LLM coding tools are more product-driven than those who hate them.
Put another way, maybe devs with their own product ideas love LLM coding tools, whilr devs without them do not.
I am genuinely not trying to throw shade here in any way. Does this rough division ring true to anyone else? Is there any better way to put it?
When I’m working on something that I just want it to work, I love using LLMs. Shell functions for me to stuff into my config and use without ever understanding, UI for side projects that I don’t particularly care about, boilerplate nestjs config crap. Anything where all I care about is the result, not the process or the extensibility of the code: I love LLMs for that stuff.
When it’s something that I’m going to continue working on for a while, or the whole point is the extensibility/cleanliness of the program, I don’t like to use LLMs nearly as much.
I think it might be because most codebases are built with two purposes: 1) to be used as a product 2) to be extended and turned into something else
LLMs are super good at the first purpose, but not so good at the second.
I heard an interesting interview on the playdate dev podcast by the guy who made Obra Dinn. He said something along the lines of “making a game is awesome because the code can be horrible. All that matters is that the game works and is fun, and then you are done. It can just be finished, and then the code quality doesn’t matter anymore.”
So maybe LLMs are just really good for when you need something specific to work, and the internals don’t matter too much. Which are more the values of a product manager than a developer.
So it makes sense that when you are thinking more product-oriented, LLMs are more appealing!