Comment by pmarreck
1 hour ago
I'm sure this exact topic has been argued hundreds of times already on HN, but I think I have a new "possibly agreeable to both sides" perspective on this after having lost man-years to retired corporate code aka "FAIAP, throwaway code"
Let LLMs write the corpo code, as it will be unlikely to still be running in 5-10 years. Frontier AI is already at the point where it writes fewer bugs per LOC than humans. By a lot.
Go ahead and do your bespoke coding on your side-project loves and core libraries... The stuff that will last, anyway.
But if you're working for a corpo and still doing bespoke... That's... not gonna last, I'm afraid. Well, either you remaining there, or that, as it were.
There's a whole spectrum of employment between faceless corporations and personal side projects. AI will replace humans because giant business believe they can do the same work, not because they will actually be able to.
The correctness of an application is limited by your ability to understand and describe what you need. We have a word for an application specification tool so detailed it eliminates all ambiguity. It's called a "programming language".
The mistakes are always in the transfer from human to machine. I still find a high-level programming language to be the best way to express my intent. Humans will make mistakes in the hand-off to AI just like they make mistakes in the hand-off to code, but at least code is deterministic.