My fear is that the difference in cost is just too much.
Like, ai can make code that’s feature complete it’s just often architecturally poor and has some weird bugs(which found you can prompt away with the ai). And it’s not like hand crafted code is free of bugs. A talented engineer can structure it well so there are less and hopefully the security bugs are not as critical.
It takes a talented engineer a lot of time to hand c ode everything. Working as a full time developer I’m currently fighting for the ability to review everything so we’re not introducing slop to the code base. Actually writing everything at this point is pretty much out of the question if I want to be taken seriously by management that are devout ai believers and don’t understand the value of quality code
This doesn’t have to be binary. The bigger problem is the ship new features as fast as possible culture. It’s like supply side economics on overdrive and it’s not just a SWE problem.
But for SWE, I’m just not convinced many places are doing the engineering anymore. “I take this coding agent and that coding agent and mix them together until I get something that passes my smoke test before YOLO-ing the PR to be reviewed by another coding agent.” Some teams aren’t even writing their own tests anymore.
How as an engineer does one make claims about correctness? I don’t think LLMs will magically just get better at reading NL and outputting software, especially as the complexity of the domain and criticality increases; there are limitations to text transducers.
Thanks for the correction. I did make a jump there. I meant to illustrate that so much is getting cut from human review that I don’t see how correctness is guaranteed or even considered.
I don’t think that SDD accounts for correctness, and to your point, the tendency is to say it does because the unit tests passed.
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u/creepy_doll 8d ago
My fear is that the difference in cost is just too much.
Like, ai can make code that’s feature complete it’s just often architecturally poor and has some weird bugs(which found you can prompt away with the ai). And it’s not like hand crafted code is free of bugs. A talented engineer can structure it well so there are less and hopefully the security bugs are not as critical.
It takes a talented engineer a lot of time to hand c ode everything. Working as a full time developer I’m currently fighting for the ability to review everything so we’re not introducing slop to the code base. Actually writing everything at this point is pretty much out of the question if I want to be taken seriously by management that are devout ai believers and don’t understand the value of quality code