Comment by 0xbadcafebee

Steaks require very few skills. Buy 10 steaks, some oil, a pan, and a heat source. By the time you've cooked the 10th steak you will be able to cook a decent steak.

Software requires a massive amount of skill. You can't say you can build "consistently good software" after writing your 10th program. Most software engineers really aren't great at judging what makes good software. So humans aren't a great solution to AI's lack of ability here. We're limited by our own inherent dumbness.

LLMs are genuinely better software engineers than most humans. But they lack the cognitive power to hold in their head and recall many ideas at once for a long time. They're a genius who gets drunk every 10 minutes. You, human, aren't better at writing software - but you aren't drunk. So for now, you manage the AI. The hope is that one day we can make LLMs not be drunk, so it can do a better job than our dumb asses do.

It's possible that we'll never be able to make it not-drunk. In that case, to get any new improvement, we'll have to make it faster.. which will make it drunk every 5 minutes instead of every 10. This means we'll spend twice as much time keeping it on the road. The hope is that somehow this will create more productivity. Probably by having more of them running at once, with more human guides... which will run into the mythical man month fallacy. Everything old is new again.