Comment by jwilliams
8 days ago
> Humans and LLMs both share a fundamental limitation. Humans have a working memory, and LLMs have a context limit.
But there’s a more important difference: I can’t spin up 20 decent human programmers from my terminal.
The argument that "code was never the bottleneck" is genuinely appealing, but it hasn’t matched my experience at all. I’m getting through dramatically more work now. This is true for my colleagues too.
My non-technical niece recently built a pretty solid niche app with AI tools. That would have been inconceivable a few years ago.
Would you entertain the idea that "work was never the bottleneck", or even "building products was never the bottleneck"?
We need to address Jevons' Paradox somehow.
I love Jevons’ paradox too, but if we apply it here don’t we still end up with more software?
Definitely would entertain -- I do agree with your framing. I just think the article undersells the impact of fast+cheap codegen.
Lowering the cost of implementation will (has) expose new bottlenecks elsewhere. But imho many of those bottlenecks probably weren’t worth serious investment in solving before. The codegen change will shift that.
I think that's where a heck of a lot of the frustration on this topic is coming from. Some engineers claim to have solved the code generation issue well enough that it hasn't been the bottleneck in their local environment, and have been trying to pivot to widening the new bottlenecks for a while now, but have been confounded by organisational dynamics.
To see the other bottlenecks starting to be taken seriously now, but (if I'm to be petulant) all the "credit" of solving the code bottleneck being taken by LLM systems, it's painful, especially when you are in a local domain where the code gen bottleneck doesn't matter very much and hasn't for a long time.
I suspect engineers that managed to solve the code generation bottlenecks are compulsive problem solvers, which exacerbates the issue.
That isn't to say there are some domains where it still does matter, although I'm dubious that LLM codegen is the best solve, but I am not dubious that it is at least a solve.
I guess that what people debate on here is what “decent” mean. From my experience, these llms spit out dog shit code, so 20 agents equal 20x more dog shit.