Comment by ericwood
1 year ago
I naively bought into the idea of a future where the computers do the stuff we’re bad at and we get to focus on the cool human stuff we enjoy. If these LLMs were truly incredible at doing my job I’d pack it up and find something else to do, but for now I’m wholly unimpressed, despite what management seems to see in it.
Well, I've spent my entire career writing software, starting in C in the 1990s, and what I'm seeing on my dev laptop is basically science fiction as far as I'm concerned.
Hey both things can be true. It’s a long ways from the AI renaissances of the past. There’s areas LLMs make a lot of sense. I just don’t find them to be great pair programming partners yet.
I think people are kind of kidding themselves here. For Go and Python, two extraordinarily common languages in production software, it would be weird for me at this point not to start with LLM output. Actually building an entire application, soup-to-nuts, vibe-code style? No, I wouldn't do that. But having the LLM writing as much as 80% of the code, under close supervision, with a careful series of prompts (like, "ok now add otel spans to all the functions that take unpredictable amounts of time")? Sure.
Don't get me started on testcase generation.
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I love the way you described it :)
We get to do cool stuff still, by instructing the LLM how to build such cool stuff.