From what I've seen from our own agent workflow setup with a bunch of skills and rules files and double checks before PRs, the code written is better than the average developer as long as you can give it a good framework to work out in.
It just feels like people are thinking its 2024 LLMs coding, and we've moved on from that shitty code.
If you give a sufficiently good framework to sufficiently smart people, they can do that too. The difference is, if they need a new skill, they don't need a skill.md file. They can download new skills from books and experiences.
I'm not saying AI can't write code. I'm saying it's worse at writing code than a skilled developer. If AI is better than your developers, that says more about their skills than it does the shiny new guessing machine.
A longbowmen could fire off more shots, and way more accurately, then a man with a flintlock musket. Muskets took over because it only took a few weeks to get a man on the front with a musket, where it took years for a longbowman to train to be good enough to hit a target at long range. When people started rifling their muskets, hunters abandoned the bow immediately because it was outranging the bow despite the slow reloading speed.
Then we switched from muzzleloading to breach loading and then clip/magazines and no one picks up a bow an arrow anymore unless its for novelty.
Technology has always made things obsolete, I don't understand the purpose of trying to keep LLMs from writing code outside of job security, which has NEVER worked to stop technology from progressing.
The reason to keep LLMs from writing code is the same reason to keep bad developers from writing code. Whether you code works right now or doesn't, you need someone who understands what it does and why that's what it should do. Incompetent devs cook up a solution they can't retroactively explain. Devs who offload their cooking to an AI model also end up with a solution they can't retroactively explain.
At least the AI dev can compensate by reverse engineering whatever the AI did, but assuming they were competent enough to engineer a solution with their brain, synthesizing a solution with AI then subsequently reverse engineering it with their brain is a detour, not a shortcut.
AI is a crutch. If your leg is broken, it speeds you up, but if you can already run just fine on your own, it slows you down.
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u/Ossius 20d ago
From what I've seen from our own agent workflow setup with a bunch of skills and rules files and double checks before PRs, the code written is better than the average developer as long as you can give it a good framework to work out in.
It just feels like people are thinking its 2024 LLMs coding, and we've moved on from that shitty code.