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Comment by dtagames | Hacker News Reader

And in #27 we find the rationale behind all LLM coding agents, "Once you understand how a program works, get someone else to write it for you."

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I think you misunderstood what the phrase actually means. You can only successfully manage or outsource a process once you understand it well enough to explain it. Therefore, most of the people doing agentic engineering are not following this Perlisim.

Oh, that's exactly what I meant, except its corollary. People who do understand how software works should absolutely be having agents code it. And we do.

> People who do understand how software works should absolutely be having agents code it.

I don’t think there’s such people.

Either you’re writing a software for the first time and so the premise is not true. Or you’re writing it a second time and what would be the point? Just reuse the code you already have.

There are lots of people who understand how software works, including the fact that every line of code is new or else you wouldn't need to write it.

Personally, I love "philosophy of software" questions like these, especially in the AI era. I write quite a bit about this on Medium:

https://medium.com/@mimixco

Maybe we need a definition of “understanding how software works”. There’s the technical aspect (computation theory, computer organization, compilation, executable format, …) and there’s the necessity aspect (the domain).

The technical aspect can be learned although you can stop at the top of the abstraction tower (the programming language and its ecosystem). The domain aspect encompasses the whole world pretty much. Contributing to Blender does not qualify you to review a Krita patch. You have to learn the latter’s code first.

The actual prescient LLM quote is "7. It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one."

Once you understand how a program works, get someone else to write it for you. Then, you will quickly find out your understanding was insufficient.

Is that ever true! I wrote a whole Medium article[0] about this, one of my most popular. It's called "YOU ARE BUGS" as a joke from Three Body Problem on Netflix.

[0] https://medium.com/gitconnected/you-are-bugs-improving-your-...

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