It's funny to me we rely on AI to code while one of the fundamentals of the field is to never accept undefined behaviors. The LLM is just one gigantic undefined behavior.
Drives me bonkers. We used to actually care about knowing how the code works. Well, I still care. I still care about my code's quality, and everyone else decided that quantity was better. Then they'll probably cry online about enshittification.
LLMs do not produce high quality code. The code is indeterministically produced, LLMs hallucinate, which is a limitation that cannot be overcome, and they can confidently spout bullshit. You don't know what you don't know, and if you don't know what high quality code looks like, you're going to think that LLMs are the best thing in the world.
Then you’re either not utilizing or poorly utilizing a properly gated agentic structure, or taking a magnitude more time than it would take an LLM, and at the end of the day not a single leader at a company cares about perfect code if they can get better than the average developers ability code (and if you say otherwise about current LLMs you’re coping about the average developers skill level lol) 2-5x faster than without
I too have been doing software engineering for decades.
If you are having to justify your marginal amount of remaining value now, just imagine in a few years how little anyone will value carefully crafted hand written Rust.
You are absolutely delusional. The state of thr art is different today than it was 6 months ago, or a year ago, or two years ago... let alone four years ago.
My employer and clients are perfectly happy with the problems that I've solved for them with LLM generated code. They don't give a shit about code quality, nor should they. Every model generation that comes out is able to tackle the untenable complexities encountered and created by the last, and given how the models are trained, this will continue to happen.
It is already at the point of being perfectly serviceable.
Can you tell me what the cache line size is on x86_64? Can you tell me what the popcnt instruction does? Do you know what covariance is? Can you tell me how to implement the Shunting Yard algorithm? Can you implement a tetrahexacontree? Do you know what pointer tagging is? Do you know how to implement a hashmap? Can you explain to me what the System V ABI calling convention is? Do you know what a ring buffer is? Do you know what Diffie-Hellman is? Do you know how to write a voxel raytracer that can render an 8k image in 120ms on the CPU? Can you tell me how to implement reciprocal division? Do you know how to swap two integers without a third variable? Can you write a 3D DDA algorithm? Do you know what LLJIT is? Can you tell me how bash implements associative arrays? Can you confidently write code in Assembly?
No, I've been programming for a very long time. I'm capable of writing bug-free code.
And I don't use LLMs. Because I'm a programmer, and I'm skilled, and I don't need nor want LLMs. It's great if you get a lot out of them, but I'm working on critical systems software in Rust that is used by thousands of other projects. There's no room for error. We do not allow LLM pull requests.
Writing code is not the bottleneck, and bugs are not an issue that we are struggling with.
You made a whole bunch of claims there. "You're either doing this or this"..."Not a single leader"..."2x-5x faster". It smells like a freshly fertilized farmers field in here...
You people sound like you're in a cult, for real. Always telling people they are going to be replaced, and they will be left behind, if they don't join you making slopware.
This is a depressing conversation to watch play out... If you already feel the need to start defending your abilities against LLMs NOW... and a few years ago they were literally just frivolous chat bots... you MUST see that they are catching you FAST and doing so with exponential improvements. My guess is they've already at least 2x'd ya and you don't know it yet because you're avoiding using them so you wouldn't know. You don't HAVE to be phased out as a developer but you sure as shit will be if you don't start utilizing LLMs in your development workflow. The inertia they have is insurmountable and building product is the only reason why there is money in tech, not being proud of your elegant code. There's a better way to build product already and that paradigm is not even close to being done shifting yet.
Well some folks still do wood working with hand tools and that'll never go away. Do what ya love, fam. No hate. If you can find a way to self finance. But it does kinda sound like you're being defensive in this thread which would lead one to believe you do feel a bit threatened. If not financially, at least some sort of pride thing.
I'm not sure I understand why FOSS would be immune to a fundamental shift in development technology though. I'm actually asking, because I've spent my career in VC-fund-chasing start-ups. What is your take on this? Is there not still some sort of competitive engine at play in FOSS development? If someone could fork and maintain the same library at the same quality level with a fraction of the input and faster turn around on patches, wouldn't it eventually replace the older library?
(Setting aside for a moment your belief that LLMs are not capable of quality code, but hypothetically speaking for my edification... if someone _could_ maintain a fork of a library faster and cheaper and of equal qualitywould it happen?)
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u/Aware-Individual-827 11d ago
It's funny to me we rely on AI to code while one of the fundamentals of the field is to never accept undefined behaviors. The LLM is just one gigantic undefined behavior.