alt Hacker NewsI’m an advocate for LLMs to code and basically use it for everything now, but just want to say you really nailed that.
It takes effort to debunk because you have to holistically consider what the problem was and actually find the better solution to prove why it’s lacking.
In other words, to debunk it, you have to do the actual work that wasn’t done the first time.
Some people may argue “so what?”
And to that I would just respond that the fast solution implies nobody probably thought about it, which is always risky and generally leads to very bad outcomes. If for no other reason than there is at least no consensus, which for long-term software evolution is deeply problematic.
This has happened many times since this trend has started, and forcing everyone to step back after a year objectively reveals the murder that has been committed that, believe it or not, is not trivially unwound.
In the wrong hands it’s a debt machine that is already killing companies from the inside.
I see increasing amounts of code merged to the codebase that is sometimes wrong, sometimes too brittle, sometimes fixes the symptom without addressing the bug. Two years ago the same code would be criticized harshly and reworked before being accepted.
Also, now people who used to manage the development but not write any code also feel their superpowers to merge LLM slop in humongous amounts. It feels like a ticking time bomb, but I am afraid of calling it out and rain on their parade of 10x productivity (or often AI psychosis). Leaving the team doesn't feel like a good decision because what I hear from many colleagues is much worse. Ah what a time to be alive...