Comment by slopinthebag
1 day ago
> Software development has the huge advantage that mistakes and hallucinations are very easy to spot: the software works or it doesn't.
Do we not care about code quality, maintainability, performance, extensibility, or understandability anymore? Honest question, not a gotcha, it's just previously getting software to pass all the tests was a small part of what we would consider "working" or perhaps "good" software. Maybe that's different now with LLMs, idk. Maybe we need automated checks for these things as well, like not compiling until the code quality is good enough to let the agent finish it's loop.
What code quality even means is different now, but also LLMs are capable of producing better quality code at scale in my companies experience. We are able to in fact sort of propagate best practices and structure via the llm to all of the teams even when they're working under time pressure.
> Do we not care about code quality, maintainability, performance, extensibility, or understandability anymore?
Yes, we should care. I've been writing a whole book about that: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...