Comment by gamblor956
6 hours ago
I read so blantant lies like AI "writing code better than me" maybe better than you! But in general it's just a big lie.
Those weren't lies. The AI does produce better code than those people. They simply weren't very good programmers to begin with.
Exactly. Someone on HN put it really succinctly earlier in the year: "LLMs look like they are good at things you are not good at."
I think this goes a long way to explain why there is such a huge difference in opinion about the quality of AI-written code: Some people say LLMs write code far better than they could, and others say the code is always terrible and requires a great deal of fixing before it's acceptable. How can two different developers say those very different things about the same product?
It might be a tough pill to swallow, but if you think your LLM is producing better code than you could produce... well, I might have some bad news for you about your own skills.
If you can't get it to output good code I'm afraid it's probably a skill or prompting issue. There are programmers that are almost certainly better than you that are using LLMs regularly to produce good code. Do you think the Linus is a bad programmer?
In my case I am more than capable of producing better code than the LLM, but I have never been the fastest on my team. My development speed was acceptable because the quality and robustness of the output was worth the time that thoughtfulness took. I was also able to improve the comprehensibility and robustness of my colleagues' code during code reviews.
But in the new environment of LLM-assisted coding, the LLM produces acceptable code so much faster than I can write it. Just taking time to understand and retool the LLM's output means an order of magnitude lower productivity and it doesn't feel like that's acceptable in this era.
Folks I know are landing 10+ PRs a day and nobody is reviewing anymore, and these are not companies that would have been skipping code review 2 years ago. The whole culture is turning against taking the time to comprehend and reason about our own work.
Here's the thing, it doesn't have to produce code better than me.
There is a wide range of code that will do the same job. 15s vs 2h for code 60% as good? 10 minutes for code 80% as good? 10 minutes today and 10 minutes tomorrow to fix something that is 30% as good?
A lot of people are going to draw that line in a different place and now that people can make that trade off you will quickly find they will and it probably wont fall where you would like it to.
At the end of the day a business pays you to produce value that will earn them money / customers. They don't pay you to write good code. Sometimes those two align and both sides are happy but they don't and often wont.
> At the end of the day a business pays you to produce value that will earn them money / customers.
I wonder, given LLM's ability to "produce code faster" are they also producing value faster? I don't see it as an end user. Software is getting worse and worse, buggier and buggier, every release. I don't see it at my company either. We're producing massive quantities of code constantly, but still every project is on fire and every line of business is way behind schedule.
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And the number of those people will grow as more people lean too heavily into AI coding.
That's not even fully true - I can't draw but I can tell LLM 'art' looks like shit