A verbal diff sounds practically useless. Does it first read out the entire left-hand base, and then read out the entire right-hand target? Does it say loudly "REMOVING ... ADDING ... "? How would it read out something like Struct->Field? This seems lower fidelity than a visual confirmation, and I just don't think that voice commands make sense with this kind of work.
"It changed the plot function so it takes another parameter called linewidth. It also added an input field in the stylecontrols section where the user can ...".
Every time I try to take a hands-off approach to the code like this, I come to regret it later. The code ends up bloated and labyrinthine. When I let it grow unabated, it becomes gradually more difficult for the LLM to understand the intended structure as the project becomes too big for the model to keep the whole thing in its context.
How would you detect the
presence of bugs in this
scenario?
How would you make sure the LLM
isn't adding yet another
useless, redundant function to
the code base?
Please don't tell me that never happens-- I've had one just in the last week and I use both OpenAI and Anthropic foundation models.
In fact, I usually let multiple LLMs implement the same feature, and then I compare them. I even run my own arena in which I calculate Elo scores for LLMs from my perspective of which one implemented features better.
Having the ability to control code agents via voice would not take away my ability to do that. But I think in the future, that will become less and less necessary. If we look back at this conversation in five years, it will look very archaic, and we will be used to having superhuman AI do everything for us. In 10 years, it will sound like a strange idea that humans were once fiddling with code to improve the quality.
Something something taking the crafts and the man out of craftsmanship to just get it out the door as quickly as possible.
All jest aside I mostly agree with you but I'd tack on another 20 years for a total of 30.
Though in this technological jump I don't think people are as excited (understandably) as when the teletype came on scene. I too like the potential but dislike the whole discourse around it, the ethics involved and the way it's deployed. Such is life I suppose.