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.

As Fowler himself states, there's a need to learn to use these tools properly.

In any case poor work quality is a failure of tech leadership and culture, it's not AI's fault.

It’s funny how nothing seems to be AI’s fault.

That's because it's software / an application. I don't blame my editor for broken code either. You can't put blame on software itself, it just does what it's programmed to do.

But also, blameless culture is IMO important in software development. If a bug ends up in production, whose fault is it? The developer that wrote the code? The LLM that generated it? The reviewer that approved it? The product owner that decided a feature should be built? The tester that missed the bug? The engineering organization that has a gap in their CI?

As with the Therac-25 incident, it's never one cause: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45036294