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

Are you sure, that the code works correctly? ;)

Now, imagine, what you would do, if you never learned to read the code.

As you were always using only AI.

Anyway, coding is much simpler and easier than reading someone else's code. And I rather code it myself than spend time to actually read and study what AI has outputted. As at the end, I need to know that code works.

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At one point, my former boss was explaining to me, how they were hired by some plane making company, to improve their firmware for controlling rear flaps. They have found some float problem and were flying to meeting, to explain what the issue was. (edit:) While flying, they figured out that they are flying with plane having that exact firmware.