unknownfuture

No, coding is the act of reifying all the things that actually matter--the requirements, the visual design, the system design, etc--into a form that a computer can execute.

The biggest value proposition of an LLM is being able to focus on the truly high-value activities while allowing the machine take care of much of that reification.

That you think architecture or interior design isn't building tells you prefer to downplay or devalue any work that isn't hands on construction. It's an interesting perspective, but it's one I'll never be able to understand or agree with.

I'm just gonna hop in and say: I get it.

If I spend a weekend standing up a self-hosted media system or something, I doubt anyone would dispute that's a fun building exercise.

If I do the same thing but use an LLM to build out instead, somehow it's not.

Yeah it's not the same kind of building as what we might have done pre-LLM but it need not be any less satisfying or rewarding.

The real disconnect seems to be the classic dichotomy: people who see coding as the point and the purpose, vs people who just want an outcome.

And that's fine!

I'm just don't understand why the one camp feels the need to deride the other.

Very well said.

I also think reading and reviewing code is a skill that connected to but very much independent of the writing of code, and the use of coding agents requires us to be far more skilled and diligent at it.

So put another way, people who were good at coding without agents may in fact be a poor fit with them, which means the entire industry is experiencing a dislocation between skills we have and skills we need, leading to extremely bimodal outcomes.

And I get that compulsion to boil this mess down into a simple good/bad dichotomy.

I absolutely have deeply mixed feelings about these tools, the ethics associated with them, the impact on the industry, on the talent pipeline, etc.

But I also can't deny that they are incredibly powerful tools that are here to stay in one form or another.

And I say that as someone who, a year ago, was absolutely convinced that they were incremental at best and scoffed at everyone who said something like "yeah but they're so much better now!" or "they're only going to get better!"

Well, they were right, they did, and the world has changed. AI generated code is landing in the Linux kernel. 250+ security holes were found and fixed in Firefox. The impact is here and now, and it's mixed and ugly and complicated.

Interesting that you think building is just coding.

What do you think architects do? Or interior designers? Or civil engineers?

Given the UIs I've experienced over the years, I'd dispute that assumption...

> Handing over software quality to the stochastic code extruder is causing a sharp drop in the quality of software put out into the world.

I genuinely don't know if that's true and I doubt you do, either. It's all feels right now.

What I do know is I run a couple of personal projects and I can say they are of objectively higher quality now that I'm using AI to build out proper CI pipelines, expand test coverage, produce higher quality architectures, etc.

Why?

Because in the past I didn't have the capacity to invest in that kind of hardening, but with AI, now I do.

Of course you'll probably make the claim that my code is probably crap, the tests suck, etc, because you've already made up your mind. But having been in the industry for 25 years, I can tell you definitively that you'd be wrong about that.

Now, what'll happen to the median codebase? God only knows. Maybe I'm especially diligent.

But given we're really only 6-12 months into the agentic coding era, I think the only conclusion you can make is that the jury is still out.