Comment by SimianSci
8 hours ago
So, in other words, we save time and money when it came to creating stuff, but we've made a whole bunch of new work around verification and testing of said stuff?
What have we gained aside from shifting where time and effort is spent in the design loop?
we've made a whole bunch of new work around verification and testing of said stuff?
The verification is what we always wanted but never had time for. For 30 years I wrote side project games without extensive testing or a fuzzer or anything because I wanted to spend my time writing the game. Now I can do that and still have the testing I always knew I should be building.
I'm largely building tools for myself and my agents. This allows me to battle test internally before releasing code to the wild. It adds some time but largely it's part of my regular work unless something breaks badly. (I also run multiple agent teams simultaneously and do staged rollouts to reduce blast radius of the latter)
This method also helps with the classic problem of being unable to identify essential complexity up front.
Engineering will always be difficult.
Right now, we're in a "honeymoon" stage, where non-engineers think that they can somehow, magically produce stuff that is comparable to what experienced and disciplined engineers can do.
That won't last long.
Despite all the caterwaulin', LLMs are just another engineering tool, and good engineers will figure out how to implement them, in ways that absolutely blow away the garbage produced by non-engineers.
It's like that rich, no-talent guy that buys a PRS guitar, and thinks he'll beat the experienced musician that still uses his beat-up old strat, but consistently makes hits.
I wonder.
In my optimistic days, I think we'll start putting mechanisms in place that will have LLMs help develop cognition, skills and expertise. It'll usher in an era of mastery and wonder.
On my bad days, I despair that the siren song of "good enough" slop will overwhelm even the most disciplined minds, and we're facing the atrophy of civilization.
Will this just end up exaggerating the pereto distribution? Will there end up being this tiny percentage of people that are driven by natural curiosity to do the very hard work of really understanding hard things? Will society even have any sort of reward for those people?
Better tested software duh
Shipping features and fixing bugs much, much faster.
no time is actually saved with LLMs. You spend more time testing or stepping on rakes finding out what it screwed up.
This is why LLM coding fails.
[dead]
Isn't this the perfect classical capitalist advertisement? Every number goes up.
- code? up - build budget? Up - developer output? Up - developer oprrational costs? Waaay up!
Why is this Bad? Every one involved profits somehow.