Comment by kiitos
3 days ago
> If you prompt the LLM for code, and then you review the code, identify specific problems, and direct the LLM to fix those problems, and repeat, you can, in fact, end up with production-ready code
I guess I will concede that this is possible, yes. I've never seen it happen, myself, but it could be the case, at some point, in the future.
> in less time than it would take to write by hand.
This is my point of contention. The process you've described takes ages longer than however much time it would take a competent senior-level engineer to just type the code from first principles. No meaningful project has ever been bottle-necked on how long it takes to type characters into editors.
All of that aside, the claim you're making here is that, speaking as a senior IC, the code that an LLM produces, guided by your prompt inputs, is more or less equivalent to any code that you could produce yourself, even controlling for time spent. Which just doesn't match any of my experiences with any current-gen LLM or agent or workflow or whatever. If your universe is all about glue code, where typing is enemy no. 1, and details don't matter, then fair enough, but please understand that this is not usually the domain of senior-level engineers.
"the code that an LLM produces, guided by your prompt inputs, is more or less equivalent to any code that you could produce yourself, even controlling for time spent"
That's been my personal experience over the past 1.5 years. LLMs, prompted and guided by me, write code that I would be proud to produce without them.
I have only claimed that for this particular project it worked really well, and was much faster than writing by hand. This particular project was arguably a best-case scenario: a greenfield project implementing a well-known standard against a well-specified design.
I have tried using AI to make changes to the Cloudflare Workers Runtime -- my usual main project, which I started, and know like the back of my hand, and which incidentally handles over a trillion web requests every day -- and in general in that case I haven't found it saved me much time. (Though I've been a bit surprised by the fact that it can find its way around the code at all, it's a pretty complicated C++ codebase.)
It really depends on the use case.