Comment by arscan
7 days ago
> But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these things increasingly do).
It works, sure, but is it worth your time to use? I think a common blind spot for software engineers is understanding how hard it is to get people to use software they aren’t effectively forced to use (through work or in order to gain access to something or ‘network effects’ or whatever).
Most people’s time and attention is precious, their habits are ingrained, and they are fundamentally pretty lazy.
And people that don’t fall into the ‘most people’ I just described, probably won’t want to use software you had an LLM write up when they could have just done it themselves to meet their exact need. UNLESS it’s something very novel that came from a bit of innovation that LLMs are incapable of. But that bit isn’t what we are talking about here, I don’t think.
> It works, sure, but is it worth your time to use?
This is something I like about the LLM future. I get to spend my time with users thinking about their needs and how the product itself could be improved. The AI can write all the CSS and sql queries or whatever to actually implement those features.
If the interesting thing about software is the code itself - like the concepts and so on, then yeah do that yourself. I like working with CRDTs because they’re a fun little puzzle. But most code isn’t like that. Most code just needs to move some text from over here to over there. For code like that, it’s the user experience that’s interesting. I’m happy to offload the grunt work to Claude.
Every little detail matters though. In SQL, do you want your database field to have limited length? If so, pay attention to validation, including cases where the field's content is built up in some other way than just entering text in a free-form text field (e.g. stuffing JSON into a database field). If not, make sure you don't use some generic "string" field type provided by your database abstraction layer that has an implicit limited length. Want to guess why that scenario's on my mind? Yeah, I neglected to pay attention to that detail, and an LLM might too. In CSS, little details affect the accessibility of the UI.
So we need to pay attention to every detail that doesn't have a single obviously correct answer, and keep the volume of code we're producing to a manageable enough level that we actually can pay attention to those details. In cases where one really is just literally moving data from here to there, then we should use reliable, deterministic code generation on top of a robust abstraction, e.g. Rust's serde, to take care of that gruntwork. Where that's not possible, there are details that need our attention. We shouldn't use unreliable statistical text generators to try to push past those details.
> So we need to pay attention to every detail that doesn't have a single obviously correct answer
I really, really wish that were the case. But look at the modern web. Look at iOS apps. Look at how long discord takes to launch on a modern computer. Look how big and slow everything is. Most end user applications released today do not pay attention to those small details. Definitely not in early versions of the software. And they're still successful. At least, successful enough.
I'd love a return to the "good old days" where we count bytes and make tight, fast software with tiny binaries that can perform well even on 20 year old computers. But I've been outvoted. There aren't enough skilled programmers who care about this stuff. So instead our super fast computers from the future run buggy junk.
Does claude even make worse choices than many of the engineers at these companies? I've worked with several junior engineers who I'd trust a lot less with small details than I trust claude. And thats claude in 2026. What about claude in 2031, or 2036. Its not that far away. Claude is getting better at software much faster than I am.
I don't think the modern software development world will make the sort of software that you and I would like to use. Who knows. Maybe LLMs will be what changes that.
2 replies →
probably won’t want to use software you had an LLM write up when they could have just done it themselves to meet their exact need
Sure... to a point. But realistically, the "use an LLM to write it yourself" approach still entails costs, both up-front and on-going, even if the cost may be much less than in the past. There's still reason to use software that's provided "off the shelf", and to some extent there's reason to look at it from a "I don't care how you wrote it, as long as it works" mindset.
came from a bit of innovation that LLMs are incapable of.
I think you're making an overly binary distinction on something that is more of a continuum, vis-a-vis "written by human vs written by LLM". There's a middle ground of "written by human and LLM together". I mean, the people building stuff using something like SpecKit or OpenSpec still spend a lot of time up-front defining the tech stack, requirements, features, guardrails, etc. of their project, and iterating on the generated code. Some probably even still hand tune some of the generated code. So should we reject their projects just because they used an LLM at all, or ?? I don't know. At least for me, that might be a step further than I'd go.
> There's a middle ground of "written by human and LLM together".
Absolutely, but I’d categorize that ‘bit’ as the innovation from the human. I guess it’s usually just ongoing validation that the software is headed down a path of usefulness which is hard to specify up-front and by definition something only the user (or a very good proxy) can do (and even they are usually bad at it).
> but I’d categorize that ‘bit’ as the innovation from the human.
Agreed.
Yeah, sure, you could create a social media or photo-sharing site, but most people that want to share cat photos with their friends could just as easily print out their photos and stick them in the mail already.