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.

LLMs are amazing at producing boilerplate, which removes the incentive to get rid of it.

Boilerplate sucks to review. You just see a big mass of code and can't fully make sense of it when reviewing. Also, Github sucks for reviewing PRs with too many lines.

So junior/mid devs are just churning boilerplate-rich code and don't really learn.

The only outcome here is code quality is gonna go down very very fast.

I envy the people working at mystical places where humans were on average writing code of high quality prior LLMs. I'll never know you now.