We put a coding agent in a while loop

Python and Typescript are elaborate formal languages that emerged from a lengthy process of development involving thousands of people around the world over many years. They are non-trivially different, and it's neat that we can port a library from one to the other quasi-automatically.

The difficulty, from an economic perspective, is that the "agent" workflow dramatically alters the cognitive demands during the initial development process. It is plain to see that the developers who prompted an LLM to generate this library will not have the same familiarity with the resulting code that they would have had they written it directly.

For some economic purposes, this altering of cognitive effort, and the dramatic diminution of its duration, probably doesn't matter.

But my hunch is that most of the economic value of code is contingent on there being a set of human beings familiar with the code in a manner that requires writing having written it directly.

Denial of this basic reality was an economic problem even before LLMs: how often did churn in a development team result in a codebase that no one could maintain, undermining the long-term prospects of a firm?

This reminds me of a software engineering axiom:

  When making software, remember that it is a snapshot of 
  your understanding of the problem.  It states to all, 
  including your future-self, your approach, clarity, and 
  appropriateness of the solution for the problem at hand.

The first one is usually short and requires a very deep understanding of one or two profound, new ideas. The second is usually very big and requires a shallow understanding of many not-so-new ideas (which are usually a reflection of the oroganisation that produced the code).

My feeling is that, provided a sufficiently long context window, an LLM will be able to go through the second kind project very easily. It will also be very good at showing that the first kind of project is not so new after all, destroying all people who can't find really new ideas.

In both case, it'll pressure institutions to have less IT specialists...

As someone who trained specifically in computer sciences, I'm a bit scared :-/