Comment by ErroneousBosh
8 hours ago
> I feel like the folks that believe we can continue to write code by hand are either in denial that LLMs will eventually (if not already) outperform handwritten code, or are in denial that employers will be ok with lower levels of productivity.
Cooking a steak and then flushing it straight down the toilet outperforms all the slow and tedious business of eating and digesting it, too.
Why should I use an LLM to write code? It cannot do the job I want it to. It cannot type the code I've already written and it cannot generate correct code.
> Cooking a steak and then flushing it straight down the toilet outperforms all the slow and tedious business of eating and digesting it, too.
That would be more equivalent to writing the code and immediately deleting it.
Except this code is being deployed, and it is still (mostly) functional, at least functional enough to satisfy your employer (their “hunger” in your analogy).
> Why should I use an LLM to write code? It cannot do the job I want it to.
Because your employer is convinced that it can do the job they want it to (whether it does the job you want it to do is irrelevant, unless you're the employer, in which case 100% handwrite your code).
> Except this code is being deployed, and it is still (mostly) functional, at least functional enough to satisfy your employer (their “hunger” in your analogy).
Bzzzt. Wrong. I don't give a fuck who's satisfied by my code. I only care about writing it.
> Because your employer is convinced that it can do the job they want it to
Bzzzt. Wrong. The code is incorrect because it is not precisely the code I would have written.
LLMs are useless to me because they don't solve the problem of actually typing the code I've written into a computer.
Again, unless you’re the employer, then you’re getting paid by someone that cares more about productivity than whether you think LLMs produce incorrect code.
All that matters is whether they agree with you.
The only control you have over this is to either a) work for yourself, or b) keep looking until you find an employer that agrees with you.
My argument is that the number of employers that fall under (b) is shrinking.
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Thing is, companies don’t care if it’s not your code or your view of it. If it works, that’s what they want. Since I stopped typing code I’ve been using my time to play some video games, read some books etc while the agents do the boring stuff (work itself). I get paid, the company is more productive, I got a bonus and a raise, everyone’s happy.
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"I am the world hence everything i say must be correct and there can be no counter opinions because i know everything. bzzzt."
> It cannot do the job I want it to.
I mean in your case, you are not able to use LLMs effectively to build features, so you should type the code by hand.
However, upper management is excited about AI because it can push features quickly to production. Granted, they will be giant balls of slop but they don't care. As long as it works in the UI, they are happy.
If no one could get anything done with AI, there wouldn't be billions invested i n it.
> I mean in your case, you are not able to use LLMs effectively to build features, so you should type the code by hand.
I never write code sitting at a computer. Mostly I write it in the car, when I have no distractions. I just type it in when I'm sitting at the computer.
I've been using Claude as an experiment for some "fun" projects that I'm unlikely to release, just to see how it is.
The thing is, at least for the stuff where it's getting deep into the far edges of synthesizer firmware, disk image decoding, audio generation and the like, Claude is mostly just quoting my own github repositories back to me.
So, I guess I'm doing something right then, or maybe I'm doing it wrong.