What have we gained aside from shifting where time and effort is spent in the design loop?
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.
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.
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?
This truly is the worst thread on HN. Now we're down to explaining 102 topics. Geez guys, what did we gain from evading regression errors? Who knows!
This method also helps with the classic problem of being unable to identify essential complexity up front.
This is why LLM coding fails.
- code? up - build budget? Up - developer output? Up - developer oprrational costs? Waaay up!
Why is this Bad? Every one involved profits somehow.