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Comment by dsego | Hacker News Reader

That's my fear, it will become a sort of a compiler. Prompts will be the code and code will be assembly, and nobody will even try to understand the details of the generated code unless there is something to debug. This will cause the codebases to be less refined with less abstraction and more duplication and bloat, but we will accept it as progress.

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For me, I think it makes it more likely I will pick simple abstractions that have good software verification. Right now the idea of a webservice that has been proven correct to a spec is ridiculous, no one has time to write that, but it seems more likely that sort of thing will become ordinary. Yes, I won't be able to hold the webservice in my head, but reviewing it and making correct and complete statements about how it functions will be easier.

Funny, I'd say that codebases nowadays usually have too many abstractions.

Some certainly do. I have also noticed that the format of the code and structure used depend more on tools and hardware the developer uses rather than some philosophical ideal. A programmer with a big monitor could prefer big blocks of uninterrupted code with long variable names. Because of the big screen area, they can see the whole outline and understand the flow of this long chunk of code. Someone on a small 13" laptop might tend to split big pieces of code into smaller chunks so they won't have to scroll so much because things would get hidden. The other thing is the IDE or editor that's used. A coder who relies on the builtin goto symbol feature might not care as much about organizing folder and file structure, since they can just click on the method name, or use the command palette that will direct them to that piece of code. Their colleague might need the code to be in well organized file structure because they click through folders to reach the method.

Those are all examples for why having a single source for code generation would most likely simply things - basically we will have a universal code style and logic, instead of every developer reinventing the wheel.

And let's face it, 95% of software isn't exactly novel.

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