Comment by ajrouvoet
5 hours ago
“I almost get physically ill when there is more code than I can keep in my head” resonates with me, but it is the exact reason that I enjoy working on better abstractions. Not in the “Javaesque” sense, as you call it, but in the mathematical sense.
I’m working intensively with LLMs to find out what they can and cannot do and for all the capabilities in there they remain terrible at compressing functionality into few concepts and as a result they produce incoherent (read Fred Brooks on coherent design!), failure-prone products. In other words: I expect that there will be good demand for people who refuse to let code grow beyond something they can keep in their head, even though the means by which one accomplishes this might be different than what you do now.
Hope that there is some solace in this.
That's the state now. Look at the leaps that were made just in the last few months.
For my work in innovation/R&D the leaps are relevant but more or less orthogonal to what I’m talking about above. I think there is a limit to the consistency and quality that one can expect of software whose surface area scales linearly with the feature set, if that makes sense.
It is tempting to extrapolate the fast progress and conclude that everything will be automated soon, but it still appears to me that LLMs have a “spikey profile”: while very good in some areas, they fail completely in many others, with no evidence that this is only a matter of time.