When every prompt produces a thousand line PR, you’re not very far from another million line monolith.
I’m a little more hopeful than the author though. I feel like it’s possible to manage the process so that does not happen.
I’m a little more hopeful than the author though. I feel like it’s possible to manage the process so that does not happen.
I've also managed to use LLMs to cut a lot of manual duplication in code where we typically didn't do enough investment: "Claude, evaluate code duplication in the functional test suite" will have no problem finding things like insufficient helpers, or tests that are testing simpler things as prerequisites, so they can rely on each other. So I am not seeing my codebases growing all that much. There's some risks of functional changes that before would be rejected due to cost which now are not, but I am not all that sure of how much that is controllable without being relatively antagonistic with management.
This is the gold, right here.
It doesn't engineer. It writes code. Enthusiastically. Usually without thinking about the bigger picture, the design, the architecture, the trade-offs, etc.
It's up to us to manage that process.
It's why senior engineers are finding LLMs a really useful tool - because we've learned to think about all that other stuff before opening the text editor. Writing the actual code was always the easy (and least valuable) bit.