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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

> It really sucks at designing types and apis though and when it creates types and apis it doesn't think or plan for the future way the system will evolve (even if it's known up front how the system will evolve).

Does that really matter? Those are things so that humans can better understand and extend a code base. That mattered when writing code was expensive and took time.

Now if it can pass all the tests it’s fine. If there’s an issue just have it rewrite things immediately. New bug? Generate a new test and rewrite code.

All, or many, of the old things that mattered just sort of don’t anymore.

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It does, LLMs are almost like electrical current in that they take the fastest path to completing the immediate goal and it takes you to a local optima instead of a global one. Your app will be worse and lower quality. It will introduce subtle bugs that you could have made impossible from the beginning.

I think you’re just imagining things. Our teams have exclusively used LLMs for coding for 6 months. Literally 0 lines written by hand. 100% more PRs than a year ago and code quality is as high due to thousands of tests.

Much of the code needs to be performant and the LLM knows this and grinds on it. Less and less human inspection is needed.

I think 90% of software can be written like this today.

I use LLM assisted coding a lot, we might just be building different kinds of software.

Yes, start with a decent quality codebase and good test coverage, and LLMs cannnot mess it up for a while.

Keep going and the human engineering time to keep it in line starts growing or it starts turning those tests into a mess of test-nothing monkeypatched blur.

Who writes those tests and makes sure they test the right thing and everything?

The LLM. And you can use an alternate LLM to antagonize the coding LLM.

You’re simply testing outputs. Make a spec but ultimately ungodly amounts of tests can be built quickly to ensure the program is outputting the right things.

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