Comment by trollbridge
1 day ago
Right.
And greenfield code is some of the most enjoyable to write, yet apparently we should let robots do the thing we enjoy the most, and reserve the most miserable tasks for humans, since the robots appear to be unable to do this.
I have yet to see an LLM or coding agent that can be prompted with "Please fix subtle bugs" or "Please retire this technical debt as described in issue #6712."
If you're willing to purchase enough tokens, you can prompt and agent to loop and fuzz its way to "retire* this technical debt as described in issue #6712". But then you still need to review it and make sure it's not just doing a "debt-swap", like some kind of metaverse financial swindler. So you're spending money to avoid fixing tech debt, but adding in the need to review "someone else's code". And to take ownership of that code!
*(Of course, depending on the issue, it could be doing anything from surpressing logs so existing tests pass, to making useless-but-passing tests, to brute-forcing special cases, to possibly actually fixing something.)