LLM Inevitabilism

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipping, no waiting. This was the future. It was inevitable.

Yesterday I wanted to rewrite a program to use a large library that would have required me to dive deep down into the documentation or read its code to tackle my use case. As a first try, I just copy+pasted the whole library and my whole program into GPT 4.1 and told it to rewrite it using the library. It succeeded at the first attempt. The rewrite itself was small enough that I could read all code changes in 15 minutes and make a few stylistic changes. Done. Hours of time saved. This is the future. It is inevitable.

PS: Most replies seem to compare my experience to experiences that the responders have with agentic coding, where the developer is iteratively changing the code by chatting with an LLM. I am not doing that. I use a "One prompt one file. No code edits." approach, which I describe here:

https://www.gibney.org/prompt_coding

> Hours of time saved

Come back in a week and update us on how long you've spent debugging all the ways that the code was broken that you didn't notice in those 15 minutes.

Usually I don't nitpick spelling, but "mimnutes" and "stylisitic" are somewhat ironic here - small correct-looking errors get glossed over by human quality-checkers, but can lead to genuine issues when parsed as code. A key difference between your two examples is that the failure-cases of an HTML download are visible and treated-as-such, not presented as successes; you don't have to babysit the machine to make sure it's doing the right thing.

EDIT: plus, everything that sibling comments pointed out; that, even if AI tools _do_ work perfectly (they don't, and never will), they'll still do harm when "working-as-intended" - to critical thinking, to trust in truth and reporting, to artistic creation, to consolidation of wealth and capital.

>Come back in a week and update us on how long you've spent debugging all the ways that the code was broken that you didn't notice in those 15 minutes.

This so much - can't believe how much of these "I am not even reading the LLM code anymore it is that good" comments I am reading. Either you are all shit programmers or your "You are an expert senior software developer" prompts are hitting the LLM harder. Because I'm here LLMing as much as the next guy, hoping it will take the work away - but as soon as I start being lazy, jumping over the code and letting it take the wheel it starts falling apart and I start getting bug reports. And the worst part is - it's the code "I wrote" (according to git blame), but I'm reading it for the first time as well and reading it with attention to detail reveals its shit.

So not sure what models you guys are getting served - especially the OpenAI stuff for coding, but I'm just not getting there. What is the expert prompt sauce I am missing here ?