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Comment by throwaway150 | Hacker News Reader

> If an LLM is typing that code - and it can maintain a test suite that shows everything works correctly - maybe we don't need that abstraction after all.

But this is a highly non-trivial problem. How do you even possibly manually verify that the test suite is complete and tests all possible corner cases (of which there are so many because synchronizing state is a hard problem)?

At least React solves this problem in a non-stochastic, deterministic manner. What can be a good reason to replace something like React that works determinstically with LLM-assisted code that is generated stochastically and there's no easy way to manually verify if the implementation or the test suite is correct and complete?

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You don't, same as for the "generate momentjs and use it". People now firmly believe they can use an LLM to build custom versions of these libraries and rewrite whole ecosystems out of nowhere because Claude said "here's the code".

I've come to realize fighting this is useless, people will do this, its going to create large fuck ups and there will be heaps of money to be made on the cleanup jobs.

I think the gap between people dealing with JavaScript cruft all day and backend large systems development is creating a massive conversational disconnect… like, this thread is plain-faced and seriously discussing reinventing date handling locally for funsies.

I also think that any company creating a reverse-centaur workforce of blind and dumb half baked devs ritualistically shaking chicken bones at their pay-as-you-go automaton has effectively outsourced their core business to OpenAI/MS while paying for the privilege. And, on the twenty year timeline as service and capital costs create crunches, those mega corps will literally be sitting on whole copies of internal business schematics and critical code of their subservient customers…

They say things, they do other things. Trusting Microsoft not to eat your sector through abusive partner programs and licensing entanglements backed with government capture? Surely the LLMs can explain how that has gone historically and how smart that is going forward.

They’ve done this before in their locked environments and programming languages, anyone that doesn’t think this is going to end the same way is delusional.

I’m starting to think actually knowing how to write code might end up being a superpower with so many people completely lost to the stochastic parrots. I’m already getting inbounds from friends and acquaintances that need “help” with their generated shit, gonna start asking for money for it.

There's going to be lots of fuck ups, but with frontier models improving so much there's also going to be lots of great things made. Horrible, soul crushing technical debt addressed because it was offloaded to models rather than spending a person's thought and sanity on it.

I think overall for engineering this is going to be a net positive.

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