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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

Middling code should not exist. Boilerplate code should not exist. For some reason we're suddenly accepting code-gen as SOP instead of building a layer of abstraction on top of the too-onerous layer we're currently building at. Prior generations of software development would see a too-onerous layer and build tools to abstract to a higher level, this generation seems stuck in an idea that we just need tooling to generate all that junk but can continue to work at this level.

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But Go culture promulgates this practice of repeating boilerplate. In fact this is one of the biggest confusion points of new gophers. "I want to do a thing that seems common enough, what library are you all using to do X?". Everyone scoffs, pushes up their glasses and says, "well actually, you should just use the standard library, it's always worked just fine for me". And the new gopher is confused because they really believe that reinventing the wheel is an acceptable practice. This is what leads to using LLMs to write all that code (admittedly, it's a fine use of an LLM).

LLMs have always been great at generating code that doesn't really mean anything - no architectural decisions, the same for "any" program. But only rarely does one see questions why we're needing to generating "meaningless" code in the first place.

This gets to one of my core fears around the last few years of software development. A lot of companies right now are saddling their codebases with pages and pages of code that does what they need it to do but of which they have no comprehension.

For a long time my motto around software development has been "optimize for maintainability" and I'm quite concerned that in a few years this habit is going to hit us like a truck in the same way the off-shoring craze did - a bunch of companies will start slowly dying off as their feature velocity slows to a crawl and a lot of products that were useful will be lost. It's not my problem, I know, but it's quite concerning.

The "LLMs shouldn't be writing code" take is starting to feel like the new "we should all just use No-Code."

We’ve been trying to "build a better layer" for thirty years. From Dreamweaver to Scratch to Bubble, the goal was always the same: hide the syntax so the "logic" can shine. But it turns out, the syntax wasn't the enemy—the abstraction ceiling was.

Where are the amazing no-hassle, no-boilerplate tools from last generation? Or the generation before that? Give me a break: it's easy to post this but it's proven very hard to simply "pick the right abstraction for everyone".

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