While letting the AI write some code can be cool and fascinating, I really can't undersand how:
- write the prompt(and you need do be precise and think and express carefully what you have in mind)
- check/try the code
- repeat
is better than writing the code by myself. AI coding like this feels like a nightmare to me and it's 100x more exhausting.
Whenever I use an LLM I always need to review its output because usually there is something not quite right. For context I'm using VS copilot, mostly ask and agent mode, in a large brownfield project.
People keep comparing higher-level programming languages to lower-level abstractions - these comparisons are absolutely false. The whole point of higher-level programming languages is for people to get away from working with the lower level stuff.
But with the way software engineers are interacting with LLMs, they are not getting away from writing code because they have to use what comes out of it to achieve their goal (writing and piecing together code to complete a project).
I think the parallels are clear for those of us who have been through this scenario.
If I see an LLM consistently producing something I don't like, I'll either add the correct behavior to the prompt, or create a tool that will tell it if it messed up or not, and prompt it to call the tool after each major change.
In our current scenario, programmers are merely describing what they think the code should do, and another program takes their description and then stochastically generates code based on it.
LLMs are more like DNA transcription, where some percentage of the time it just injects a random mutation into the transcript, either causing am evolutionary advantage, or a terminal disease.
This whole AI industry right now is trying to figure out how to always get the good mutation, and I don't think it's something that can be controlled that way. It will probably turn out that on a long enough timescale, left unattended, LLMs are guaranteed to give your codebase cancer.
It's a perfectly cromulent approach and skillset - but it's a wildly different one.