Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

In my company I feel that we getting totally overrun with code that's 90% good, 10% broken and almost exactly what was needed.

We are producing more code, but quality is definitely taking a hit now that no-one is able to keep up.

So instead of slowly inching towards the result we are getting 90% there in no time, and then spending lots and lots of time on getting to know the code and fixing and fine-tuning everything.

Maybe we ARE faster than before, but it wouldn't surprise me if the two approaches are closer than what one might think.

What bothers me the most is that I much prefer to build stuff rather than fixing code I'm not intimately familiar with.

"but quality is definitely taking a hit now that no-one is able to keep up."

And its going to get worse! So please explain to me how in the net, you are going to be better off? You're not.

I think most people haven't taken a decent economics class and don't deeply understand the notion of trade offs and the fact there is no free lunch.

Technology has always helped people. Are you one of the people that say optimizing compilers are bad? Do you not use the intellisense? Or IDEs? Do you not use higher level languages? Why not write in assembly all the time? No free lunch right.

Yes there are trade offs, but at this point if you haven’t found a way to significantly amplify and scale yourself using llms, and your plan is to instead pretend that they are somehow not useful, that uphill battle can only last so long. The genie is out of the bag. Adapt to the times or you will be left behind. That’s just what I think.

Technology does not always help people, in fact often it creates new problems that didn't exist before.

Also telling someone to "adapt to the times" is a bit silly. If it helped as much as its claimed, there wouldn't be any need to try and convince people they should be using it.

A LOT of parallels with crypto, which is still trying to find its killer app 16 years later.

I don’t think anyone needs to be convinced at this point. Every developer is using LLM and I really can’t believe someone who has made a career out of automating things wouldn’t be immediately drawn to trying them at least. Every single company seems convinced and using it too. The comparison to crypto makes no sense.

> Every developer is using LLM

Citation needed. In my circles, Senior engineer are not using them a lot, or in very specific use cases. My company is blocking LLMs use apart from a few pilots (which I am part of, and while claude code is cool, its effectiveness on a 10-year old distributed codebase is pretty low).

You can't make sweeping statements like this, software engineering is a large field.

And I use claude code for my personal projects, I think it's really cool. But the code quality is still not there.

Stack overflow published recently a survey in which something like 80% of developers were using AI and the rest “wants to soon”. By now I have trouble believing a competent developer is still convinced they shouldn’t use it at all , though a few ludites perhaps might hold on for a bit longer.