Comment by tshaddox
5 days ago
I don't doubt that LLMs will have a large impact on software and programming. But I do wonder whether it will be a positive impact. I think one of the biggest problems the software industry has is that it's far too rare for the people building software to have deep explanatory knowledge about what they have built. LLMs threaten to make this problem vastly worse than it already is.
the reason this is rare is that no one stays on any one project long enough for this to be a reality anywhere. you know anyone working 15-20 years on the same project? I’ve been on many projects where deep explanatory knowledge existed through and through until the project was initial-code-complete and then people left to do other amazing things leaving project with people with limited knowledge of it. I suspect this is the case for vast majority of software