Comment by d0liver
1 day ago
I think "AI as a dumb agent for speeding up code editing" is kind of a different angle and not the one I wrote the article to address.
But, if it's editing that's taking most of your time, what part of your workflow are you spending the most time in? If you're typing at 60WPM for an hour then that's over 300 lines of code in an hour without any copy and paste which is pretty solid output if it's all correct.
But that’s just it: 300 good lines of reasonably complex working code in an hour vs o4-mini can churn out 600 lines of perfectly compilable code in less than 2 minutes, including the time it takes me to assemble the context with a tool such as repomix (run locally) or pulling markdown docs with Jina Reader.
The reality is, we humans just moved one level up the chain. We will continue to move up until there isn’t anywhere for us to go.
> perfectly compilable code
Isn't that the bare minimum attribute of working code? If something is not compilable, it is WIP. The difficulty is having correct code, then efficiently enough code.
Which is why you dictate series of tests for the LLM to generate, and then it generates way more test coverage than you ordinarily would have. Give it a year, and LLMs will be doing test coverage and property testing in closed-loop configurations. I don't think this is a winnable argument!
Certainly, most of the "interesting" decisions are likely to stay human! And it may never be reasonable to just take LLM vomit and merge it into `main` without reviewing it carefully. But this idea people have that LLM code is all terrible --- no, it very clearly is not. It's boring, but that's not the same thing as bad; in fact, it's often a good thing.
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