Comment by visarga
2 days ago
Untested undocumented LLM code is technical debt, but if you do specs and tests it's actually the opposite, you can go beyond technical debt and regenerate your code as you like. You just need testing to be so good it guarantees the behavior you care about, and that is easier in our age of AI coding agents.
> but if you do specs and tests it's actually the opposite, you can go beyond technical debt and regenerate your code as you like.
Having to write all the specs and tests just right so you can regenerate the code until you get the desired output just sounds like an expensive version of the infinite monkey theorem, but with LLMs instead of monkeys.
You can have it write the specs and tests, too, and review and refine them much faster than you could write them.
... so you hand-write the specs and tests?
I use LLMs to generate tests as well, but sometimes the tests are also buggy. As any competent dev knows, writing high-quality tests generally takes more time than writing the original code.