alt Hacker NewsMost managers don't read the code of their direct reports. They just trust that the code is "good enough" and that there are enough other processes in place to catch bugs before they cause too much damage. I think I'm a pretty skilled programmer, or I'm at least good enough at interviewing to convince other people of that, but it's pretty obvious from comparing LLM generated code to code I'd write myself that in many domains LLMs are superior to me. They do make mistakes, but so do I, and those mistakes are eventually found and corrected.
We're in the very early stages of LLM driven programming, so it's hard to say how it will all shake out, but my anecdotal experience is that LLM written software is very reliable and easy to extend and develop. I have a side project that is about 90% LLM generated code (about 25k lines of production code and a similar amount of test code). This is a revenue generating product and I've had no issues with reliability, security, or performance.
For what it's worth this app is a rails app and I have no plans to switch to anything else. Rails works nicely, the LLMs extend it easily, and almost everything is I/O bound so I don't need C++/Rust level performance.
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but my anecdotal experience is that LLM written
software is very reliable and easy to extend and
develop.
Too much discourse creates a false dichotomy of "awesome, wonderful, hand-crafted code" vs "shitty AI slop."
A lot of hand-crafted code is pretty bad. This is true even with talented engineers: there are often edge cases they did not think of... and in many cases, could not have thought of.
And AI code is pretty good if it's steered and vetted by a knowledgeable engineer. It is clear to me, and has been clear for a long time, that "talented engineer plus AI" is the winning combination and will remain that way for at least the near future.
> I think I'm a pretty skilled programmer, or I'm at least good enough at interviewing to convince other people of that, but it's pretty obvious from comparing LLM generated code to code I'd write myself that in many domains LLMs are superior to me.
there's an important caveat here - LLMs absolutely can write better code than me, but they can also write far worse code, and often don't seem to be able to tell the difference. I find myself spending a lot of time prompting the bots to refine their code in specific ways that I only know about because I read the generated output.