It wouldn't make sense to confuse attributes of the software with attributes of the programmer.

Otherwise, one could simply declare one's IQ in a const somewhere, and have all unit tests follow the form: if the programmer's IQ is high enough, then the method under test is likely correct.

I think SWE fundamentals matter - because it will be a long time before software is a closed system.

And the problem is that as long as humans are in the loop building software that dynamic will have to be maintained.

We use Loki for logging at work. There’s certain types of queries it just doesn’t support. And so the question becomes -

Do you change logging providers Adapt to Loki’s capabilities Create a third layer / tiered storage.

And each of those decisions have multiple downstream consequences. It’s not that LLMs can’t make those decisions per say, it’s that

What does an LLM do when five different people ask for a system optimized to do five different things.

It could figure it out itself, but like I don’t think that’s how the human software contract works.

An interesting question. We (humans) care about maintainability because the codebase will be adapted by teams of us for many years, based on new feature and bug fixes.

Rewriting from scratch is basically never an option after a certain amount of time.

Maybe the machines could just start from scratch each time and come at maintainability from a totally different angle

I built a harness from scratch prior to trying any of the ones out there, so I knew how it work in a real way. I QUICKLY understood that the biggest issue with getting my shit done is that _my_ inputs are the untrusty ones. How many time do you hit backspace in a day?

LLMs are not smart in any way, but they are a weird kind of effective thats very different.

Great. We are pretending that an LLM can think, and has intelligence. I thought the marketing wasn't supposed to work on us.