Why? Why do we need to "write code so much faster and quicker" to the point we saturate systems downstream? I understand that we can, but just because we can, does'nt mean we should.
But that's point of TFA, no? Now that writing code is no longer the bottleneck, the upstream and downstream processes have become the new bottlenecks, and we need to figure out how to widen them.
As I see it, the end goal for all of this is generating software at the speed of thought, or at least at the speed of speech. I want the digital butler to whom I could just say - "I'm not happy with the way things happened to day, please change it so that from here on, it'll be like x" - and it'll just respond with "As you wish", and I'll have confidence that it knows me well enough and is capable enough to have actually implemented the best possible interpretation of what I asked for, and that the few miscommunications that do occur would be easy to fix.
We're obviously not close that yet, but why shouldn't we build towards it?
I think it’s contestable that writing the code was ever the main bottleneck.
> As I see it, the end goal for all of this is generating software at the speed of thought, or at least at the speed of speech.
The question is what distinguishes that from having AGI, and if the answer is “nothing”, then that will change the whole game entirely again.
Using AI to ship more and more code faster, instead of to make code more mature, will make this worse.
With coding agent projects I find that investing in DRY doesn't really help very much. Needing to apply the same fix in two places is a waste of time as a human. An agent will spot both places with grep and update them almost as fast as if there was just one.
It's another case where my existing programming instincts appear to not hold as well as I would expect them to.
Is the goal basically a codebase where your interactions are mediated through an LLM?
A bloated table codebase isn't good code, because it's harder to understand and makers changes to than the equivalent non-bloated codebase.
But... bloat does look a little bit different when you no longer need to optimize code for saving humans typing time.
Much of the confusing code I've encountered during my career has been confusing because it had too many layers of indirection, which happened because someone was applying DRY too aggressively because they didn't want to duplicate even the smallest pieces of logic in more then one place.
Good coding agents will only DRY like that if you tell them to.