Comment by declan_roberts
6 days ago
A small change scoped to <50 lines is something easy to write for a normal software engineer. When do the LLMs start doing the hard part?
6 days ago
A small change scoped to <50 lines is something easy to write for a normal software engineer. When do the LLMs start doing the hard part?
A small change around 50 lines is the size of an advent of code solution (the hardest part). Most of the code you write around that is for defensive coding (error handling, malformed input, expected output,…) which is the other hard part. Then you connect these cores to form a system and that’s another tough problem. And it needs to evolve to.
We’ve built tools to help us with the first part, framework with the second, architecture principles with the third and software engineering techniques for the fourth. Where do LLMs help?
When you wire them up to your cicd process with pull requests and the github gui as your interface, rather than sitting there passively riding along as it prompts you the changes it’s going to make.
With my async agent I do not care about how easy it is for me, it’s easier to tell the agent to do the workflow and comeback to it later when I’m ready to review it. If it’s a good change I approve the pr, if not I close it.
Can you type that 50 line change in less than 15 seconds?
It'd take less than the time it takes to come up with The Perfect Prompt.