I know senior developers that are very radical on some nonsense patterns they think are much better than others. If they see code that don't follow them, they say it's trash.
Even so, you can guide the LLM to write the code as you like.
And you are wrong, it's a lot on how people write the prompt.
“You are overestimating the skill of [reading, comprehending, and critically assessing code of a non-guaranteed quality]” is an absurd statement if you properly expand out what “code review” means.
I don’t care if you code review the CSS file for the Bojangles online menu web page, but you better be code reviewing the firmware for my dad’s pacemaker.
This whole back and forth with LLM-generated code makes me think that the marginal utility of a lot of code the strong proponents write is <1¢. If I fuck up my code, it costs our partners $200/hr per false alert, which obliterates the profit margin of using our software in the first place.
We can capture enough reliability on what LLMs produce there by guided integration tests and UX tests along with code review and using other LLMs to review along with other strategies to prvent semantic and code drift
Do you know how much crap wordpress ,drupal and Joomla sites I have seen?
Just that work can be automated away
But Ive also worked in high end and mission critical delivery and more formal verification etc - that’s just moving the goalposts on what AI can do- it will get there eventually
Last year you all here were arguing AI Couldn’t code - now everyone has moved the goalposts to formal high end and mission critical ops- yes when money matters we humans are still needed of course - no one denying that- its the utility of the sole human developer against the onslaught of machine aided coding
This profession is changing rapidly- people are stuck in denial
This is the nutshell of your argument. I’m not convinced. Technologies often hit a ceiling of utility.
Imagine a “progress curve” for every technology, x-axis time and y-axis utility. Not every progress curve is limitlessly exponential, or even linear - in fact, very few are. I would venture to guess that most technological progress actually mimics population growth curves, where a ceiling is hit based on fundamental restrictions like resource availability, and then either stabilizes or crashes.
I don’t think LLMs are the AI endgame. They definitely have utility, but I think your argument boils down to a bold prediction of limitless progress of a specific technology (LLMs), even though that’s quite rare historically.
I do think there is a great deal of VC baiting hype in statements by Dario and Altman about ai coding but at the same time the progress has indeed been positive
We've finally proven or unlocked the secret to learning in machines - the only question is how fast that progress curve is - yes it might get stuck for a few years but I think this is really an inflection point that we’ve reached with these technologies