I feel like there is an unspoken assumption of long term maintainability when it comes to LLM generated software. We are still very early in this, so I don't want to make assumptions. In principle, it shouldn't be impossible to both write and maintain stable software, purely with agents.

At least, I'm not aware of any actual reasons, backed by a proper theory.

On the other hand. I've noticed some persistent issues with code generated by agents, especially poorly supervised agents. If engineers become less vigilant, agents never get to the point of not needing supervision and juniors never pick up required skills, this could lead to real trouble.

> The problem is, your employer doesn’t care whether your brain is creating new neurons and connections. They care about productivity and profit.

It was/is a struggle to get them to recognize and balance tech dept, we must now push to balance cognitive dept as well.

Some employers will eventually get it as they have with tech dept. And those will be the ones we see succeed.

Businesses demanding high productivity and speed only encourages illicit drug use.

> The problem is, your employer doesn’t care whether your brain is creating new neurons and connections. They care about productivity and profit.

I feel like this is an odd thing to be reticent about. You're working for someone who doesn't care about you and, in this changing landscape, you're compartmentalizing that in order to determine how best to care for yourself. Logically, to care for yourself you'd need to find an environment in which your needs aren't being neglected.

Well there’s a lot of middle ground between “don’t use AI” and “generate everything, exclusively.”

When the bill for the latter lands with a heavy thud, moderation and common sense start to look like a pretty good idea.

> or are in denial that employers will be ok with lower levels of productivity.

More like sweeping the dust under the rug for later. The initial productivity boost is massive but at the cost of massive upfront tech debt. Given that LLMs aren't as good at removing code as they are at generating it, this is a problem.

> The problem is, your employer doesn’t care whether your brain is creating new neurons and connections. They care about productivity and profit.

Which is why businesses, tech and otherwise, are falling apart constantly unless they achieve gigafuck scale status, at which point they're unkillable no matter how much of this cancer infests their management.

I don't know how we arrived at a social norm where it's just completely fine that leadership in massive companies is just absolutely useless at their jobs, but the firms that last another hundred years are going to be the ones that figure out how to fire them all.

Not shocked to see here that people believe "manually writing code" is the way to build brain power.

How about moving up the stack?

It is game theory optimal to use LLMs as little as possible even if your employer wants you to use it. The less you use it, the more competitive you are in the market, and probably also in your current workplace, LLM usage metrics notwithstanding. This fact will remain true forever, even if LLMs always outperform handwritten code and all employers want you to use them.

Probably what you want to do is use it a lot when you first start a job to establish some productivity credence, then as you become ready to switch jobs, use it less and less until you're writing everything by hand and taking interviews.

> I feel like the folks that believe we can continue to write code by hand are either in denial that LLMs will eventually (if not already) outperform handwritten code, or are in denial that employers will be ok with lower levels of productivity.

Cooking a steak and then flushing it straight down the toilet outperforms all the slow and tedious business of eating and digesting it, too.

Why should I use an LLM to write code? It cannot do the job I want it to. It cannot type the code I've already written and it cannot generate correct code.

> I feel like the folks that believe we can continue to write code by hand are either in denial that LLMs will eventually (if not already) outperform handwritten code...

They certainly don't today. Perhaps they will in the future, but based on the lack of improvement thus far it seems unlikely that they will get to this point. But whether or not they do improve to that point, the reality is that today, LLMs do not give you a productivity boost unless you give up on quality and just YOLO stuff the LLM gives you without actually checking it. And nobody should be willing to do the latter, because that is how you get software/infrastructure that doesn't actually work.

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