alt Hacker News> You can always know more
But the direction is reversed.
I figure out how to do something, wrap it in a bunch of functions, and then kinda just use it. If it just keeps doing what it should, I may kinda forget how it works. But I don't forget that I made it, and that I understood it, that will never not have happened. So in a way, I am able to "forget" some things because I still know I knew them. And I trust that programmers who write programs that I dream about writing also know what they're doing.
With LLM, you accumulate stuff with from knows where, ultimately fished from a vast ocean named question mark, by whatever turns of phrase you and involved agents happened to use, and what the temperature was at that moment. Which is of course where all the harnessing and looping and running code on the output comes in, but still, ultimately you have no idea. Which is fine for prototypes, but long term? Good luck.
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I guess I'm just lost on things not being solved to a degree. Maybe its that I'm an iOS engineer where things are so locked down as far as goals and efficiencies that AI doing the work is verifiable by running the program, setting up some pre and post verification of code, and writing tests that look for certain edge cases. To be frank, it just seems like a trust thing. I trust it to the degree I am willing to to verify it.
I can look at mystery code in the work app from five years ago, and know that I wrote it without any memory of doing so. I can remember the warty bits and pitfalls, maybe not in great detail but enough to jog the memory and I'll be more effective while working on it than someone seeing it for the first time.