Judging from all the comments here, it’s going to be amazing seeing the fallout of all the LLM generated code in a year or so. The amount of people who seemingly relish the ability to stop thinking and let the model generate giant chunks of their code base, is uh, something else lol.
It entirely depends on the exposure and reliability the code needs. Some code is just a one-off to show a customer what something might look like. I don't care at all how well the code works or what it looks like for something like that. Rapid prototyping is a valid use case for that.
I have also written a C++ code that has to have a runtime of years, meaning there can be absolutely no memory leaks or bugs whatsoever, or TV stops working. I wouldn't have a language model write any of that, at least not without testing the hell out of it and making sure it makes sense to myself.
It's not all or nothing here. These things are tools and should be used as such.
> It entirely depends on the exposure and reliability the code needs.
Ahh, sweet summer child, if I had a nickel for every time I've heard "just hack something together quickly, that's throwaway code", that ended up being a critical lynchpin of a production system - well, I'd probably have at least like a buck or so.
Obviously, to emphasize, this kind of thing happens all the time with human-generated code, but LLMs make the issue a lot worse because it lets you generate a ton of eventual mess so much faster.
Also, I do agree with your primary point (my comment was a bit tongue in cheek) - it's very helpful to know what should be core and what can be thrown away. It's just in the real world whenever "throwaway" code starts getting traction and getting usage, the powers that be rarely are OK with "Great, now let's rebuild/refactor with production usage in mind" - it's more like "faster faster faster".
In one camp are the fast code slingers putting something quickly without long design and planning. They never get it just right the first few iterations.
So in the other camp you have seasoned engineers who will have a 5x longer design and planning process. But they also never get it right the first several iterations. And by the time their “properly-engineered” design gets its chance to shine, the business needs already changed.
Or there are those people who were fast code slingers when they began coding, and learned how to design, and now they ship production ready code even faster with rock solid architecture and code quality even after the first iteration.
> Ahh, sweet summer child, if I had a nickel for every time I've heard "just hack something together quickly, that's throwaway code", that ended up being a critical lynchpin of a production system - well, I'd probably have at least like a buck or so.
Because this is the first pass on any project, any component, ever. Design is done with iterations. One can and should throw out the original rough lynchpin and replace it with a more robust solution once it becomes evident that it is essential.
If you know that ahead of time and want to make it robust early, the answer is still rarely a single diligent one-shot to perfection - you absolutely should take multiple quick rough iterations to think through the possibility space before settling on your choice. Even that is quite conducive to LLM coding - and the resulting synthesis after attacking it from multiple angles is usually the strongest of all. Should still go over it all with a fine toothed comb at the end, and understand exactly why each choice was made, but the AI helps immensely in narrowing down the possibility space.
Not to rag on you though - you were being tongue in cheek - but we're kidding ourselves if we don't accept that like 90% of the code we write is rough throwaway code at first and only a small portion gets polished into critical form. That's just how all design works though.
I would love to work at the places you have been where you are given enough time to throw out the prototype and do it properly. In my almost 20 years of professional experience this has never been the case and prototype and exploratory code has only been given minimal polishing time before reaching production and in use state.
We are all too well aware of the tragedy that is modern software engineering lol. Sadly I too have never seen that situation where I was given enough time to do the requisite multiple passes for proper design...
I have been reprimanded and tediously spent collectively combing over said quick prototype code for far longer than the time originally provided to work on it though, as a proof of my incompetence! Does that count?
Dunno about you, but I find thinking hard… when I offload boilerplate code to Claude, I have more cycles left over to hold the problem in my head and effectively direct the agent in detail.
This makes sense. I find that after 15 to 20 iterations, I get better understanding of what is being done and possible simplifications.
I then manually declare some functions, JSDoc comments for the return types, imports and stop halfway. By then the agent is able to think, ha!, you plan to replace all the api calls to this composable under the so and so namespace.
It's iterations and context. I don't use them for everything but I find that they help when my brain bandwidth begins to lag or I just need a boilerplate code before engineering specific use cases.
I think you are over estimating the quality of code humans generate. I take LLM over any output of junior - to mid level developer (if they were given the same prompt / ask)
The amount of people who get really defensive when people actually point out that, no, your iPhone is not in anyway comparable to an actual dedicated camera is kinda crazy.
> no, your iPhone is not in anyway comparable to an actual dedicated camera
9 times out of 10 when I see someone making this claim it’s engagement bait. They know it triggers people and generates interactions.
I think most people are well aware that they’re not the same. The point usually made is that it’s amazing that we can get such good photos out of something that fits in our pockets. In well-lit scenes you really can get some impressive image quality out of those tiny devices.
I take a iphone and a nikon z5 with me. in their defense, if you dont' know what you're doing, the iphone will consistently take better photos. my z5 photo beat it any day but I had to learn how to be intentional with it in order to get that difference.
I’m not sure I’ve seen a single actual case of this. But I also haven’t seen a single actual case of anyone having any loud opinions about their phones for many many years now. I might just be finally old.
