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Comment by gigel82

3 days ago

I think there are 2 types of software engineering jobs: the ones where you work on a single large product for a long time, maintaining it and adding features, and the ones that spit out small projects that they never care for again.

The latter category is totally enamored with LLMs, and I can see the appeal: they don't care at all about the quality or maintainability of the project after it's signed off on. As long as it satisfies most of the requirements, the llm slop / spaghetti is the client's problem now.

The former category (like me, and maybe you) see less value from the LLMs. Although I've started seeing PRs from more junior members that are very obviously written by AI (usually huge chunks of changes that appear well structured but as soon as you take a closer look you realize the "cheerleader effect"... it's all AI slop, duplicated code, flat-out wrong with tests modified to pass and so on) I still fail to get any value from them in my own work. But we're slowly getting there, and I presume in the future we'll have much more componentized code precisely for AIs to better digest the individual pieces.

Give it more than the minimal context so it can emulate the project's style. The recent async agents should be good at this.