"It’s about attention and understanding. To keep my attention, I must go beyond ‘read code’ like a passive observer of agents from afar. To really connect with the architecture of the system, it helps to truly experience the code"
I guess the funny answer that is behind this sentence is: You have to train your own mental model. We always argue about code in a very abstract and logical manner. But when coding the subconsciousness makes most of the decision ("this just feels right"). But for this to work you have to train it. And this does only work in a very limited way with code reviews or reading documentation. It requires repetition and deep focus.
When there is an issue in production with this mental model you will be able to point to the cause of an error message instantly. With generated code you'll search for a long time with your slow, conscious part of the brain.
For LLMs to be really helpful, they have to take over complete maintenance of the code. So you can treat them like an external library: Just assume it works. Otherwise this will always be problematic.
> For LLMs to be really helpful, they have to take over complete maintenance of the code. So you can treat them like an external library: Just assume it works.
We already tried this with humans. It works so poorly that it got the derogatory name “ivory tower architect”. It usually results in theoretical designs that are unworkable in the actual system, implementation teams (or LLMs) that work around the architecture and a lot of slowing down of velocity as the architect and implementers argue past each other.
This happens when the architect is out of touch. If the architect themselves works on the code, writes code, deals with the imposed restrictions, then the chances of that happening is much lower. Assuming, that they are a good architect.
I agree, if the architect participates in the implementation then they avoid this anti-pattern. That’s not compatible with hands-off autonomous agents where you treat implementation as a black box.
> With generated code you'll search for a long time
The observability people will claim that if the dynamic runtime behaviour of your system makes it hard to find the source of a behaviour, your system must be made more transparent and observable. They would also claim this was always the case -- we should never have relied on people's mental models being amazing because people move around.
(I don't know yet where I stand on this but I'm trying to learn more.)
If it was only "my" system without any integrations, I might agree.
But currently e.g. I am working on an MES/Scada layer that integrates data from a load of different machines in a factory. These machines are from China, Korea, Germany, Sweden ...
Upwards there is an ERP integration (and some other systems).
Sometimes machines are updated and suddenly behave differently. Giving error messages in Chinese.
The ERP has the nasty behavior of returning error messages where it is not clear whether the actual processing actually happened or not. There are some heuristics on parsing the error messages, but these also change with new versions.
Sometimes one machine overloads cloud infrastructure and completely unrelated functionality fails.
Sometimes the on-premise network stops working for whatever reason and data is lost.
Sometimes operators do not understand a perfectly valid error message like: "The batch you loaded into input position XY has expired on XZ and cannot be used for production": "But we have been told to use it..."
So when you get called out at night, because the production line stopped and "MES is displaying an error message", it is mostly about finding out what integration failed and who else to wake up. Getting this right is very much appreciated by your colleagues.
And this is where you need a mental model of how things are connected, what error message happens because of what external causes etc.
Observability can only work perfectly for known problems. In a complex system for unexpected problem you can either provide too much data, so analyzing it and finding the relevant part becomes really hard, or too little data which makes finding the issue impossible.
There are so many companies claiming to provide the perfect observability solution and there are certainly solutions that help. But it is all very far from perfect.
Not relying on people is managers wet dream. And for a lot of people it might be true that they can be easily replaced. But for complex systems there are always some key people that you cannot replace without causing issues.
And here's the thing... juniors become seniors become experts, by doing this their entire career.
By having an understanding built during their entire career.
Right now we live in a fairly-land of mixed capacity. LLMs being used in parallel with skilled people. But as time progresses, there will be no more skilled people, because no one will learn and develop those skills.
If you're in the world of LLMs now, you are basically completely stalled in your personal growth in this field. You will never improve, and some seem to say they lose capabilities as they rely upon LLMs.
The world always changes. But the decisions being made today, are being made by skilled people.
What will the world look like, when it's just all "bro, lol, just tell it to make your thing" and then done?
I always hated writing code but loved debugging. LLM super charges systems thinkers & auditors, it’s just a different process and no different than copy and paste from stack overflow. It all comes down to the architecture design and LLM just exposes how bad people are at designing dynamic architectures.
I need to write code because otherwise LLMs will write too much code, it’s only when you fully understand the problem you can generalise it enough to not end up with 10k lines and 5 abstraction layers for “hello world”. LLMs are token predictors, so all solutions are you tokens, the more problems to solve == the more tokens (code) to output.
> I need to write code because otherwise LLMs will write too much code, ...
I second that and I can give an example that happened to me yesterday with a totally SOTA model (a US, not Chinese model).
I needed to display an information on the client-side. Something trivial. I ask the LLM to do it. The thing went onto a rampage: it somehow found a way to pass the information from the server to the client during the initial handshake (already: why, just why?). Modifying both server-side code and client-side code. And it worked.
To an unsuspecting programmer/tester (or automated test)/user: the info is there, what was asked has been done. So it's perfect, flawless LLM victory right?
Except none of that sloppy-pasta was necessary: the info was already available on the client-side and was a one-line change, purely client-side.
These thing shall definitely, as of 2026, write way too much code.
And btw the companies selling metered tokens have a very serious incentive to produce the most complicated, rube-goldberg, solutions that use as many tokens as possible, while still kinda solving the problem.
That way not only you consume tokens to produce the code, but later on you consume tokens when working on that code (which btw is a guaranteed thing: for the LLM just introduced new bugs in that gargantic amount of crap it output).
Funnily enough the very same people who made fun of copy-pasta happen to be in love with sloppy-pasta. Go figure.
> If we’re building a software factory, details matter. The details that establish architectural patterns. Down to algorithms and performance. Agents push us to evaluate, measure, and guard. They’ve made it cool to add CI into side projects early, not as an afterthought. That’s massive improvement to the state of software.
Why are you building a software factory though, and why weren't you immediately adding CI to every project?
> It’s our job to build the software factory - not just the software. Software engineers maintain the assembly line allowing anyone to prompt for a change and ship immediately.
Again, why? Where are you working where this is considered a good idea? This would mean that the software engineers are not just being completely kicked out of all business decisions, but asked to build a moat that ensures they stay on the other side of it.
Any business that intentionally devalues the insights gained through implementation will eventually starve itself to death by making too many passive thoughtless moves. No insight will ever be gained just spot checking AI. Is their intention really just to make tiny amounts of profit while riding the thing into the ground? Crabs in a bucket, man.
In fact, not many people know that these days, but a human doing a thing by bashing their head against it, often tends to improve. My hand-written code is my best yet. My breadth of knowledge, wider than ever.
Sure, if you prefer low quality go ahead. Many people have always preferred low quality. Many people prefer to eat junk.
I also genuinely believe that time tradeoff doesn’t matter.
> Before a couple of years ago, it might have taken me an hour to type out and debug that code.
In fact, it's better not to generate it imo. Like you said the quality is higher, and by the time I get done reviewing the LLM's output I haven't really saved time over just doing it myself. LLMs are only useful for things you can verify extremely quickly (like a short script), or for things where you don't care about the quality.
This is too generic. There's some code I need to write like core abstractions that are going to set the pace for everything. Or tricky steps that can look good without actually working well.
Then there's the mass. I don't need that anymore. The mountains of boilerplate, etc.
I write little islands which need high judgement that are then connected by the obvious goo.
The boilerplate was always boilerplate though. You never needed to write it to already have that code in your project, so I'm confused by what you mean.
Generating boilerplate is strictly inferior than something already written and tested by the authors of the tools. You will eventually have to make slight adjustments to it, and those decisions can be just as impactful as your "high judgment" code. Those decisions are what actually enable your high judgment code to stay clean and straightforward.
Poor decisions in code architecture are some of the biggest blunders of all. Once you have begun to fill in the blanks on some boilerplate code, it ceases to remain boilerplate code. If you let AI make those adjustments, you will eventually blunder the codebase in precisely this way. You'll first recognize it when your high judgment code seems too verbose. You'll then soon realize some things are impossible without adjusting the boilerplate you started off with. Then the AI will fail to grasp what you want and you'll have to manually untangle a lot of the slop that you let grow out of control. Good luck with that.
Recently, even a tourist lost to OAI's model in competitive coding. To be honest, I haven't been able to beat AI at coding since around 5.2. People often say 'AI can't write good code,' but in reality, the quality of AI's output is layered depending on the level of the prompt input. The deeper the prompt, the better the code actually gets.
Usually, when people say AI code is terrible, it's because they either don't understand the theory well but have grown through hands-on experience and can't explain things properly to the AI, or they don't know what they don't know. Or there are the very few who are just far better coders than AI.
Some people will say they're among the rare few who can write better code than AI, and for some that may be true. But in my experience, the vast majority are not. Even from my perspective as a beginner, I could see flaws when I looked at their git code. It's a metacognition problem.
Realistically speaking, at the script level, it's quite common to see AI surpass human programmers as you increase the input level. You might disagree, but that's probably because you're a specialist in that field, deeply immersed in a very narrow area—it only holds true in that limited scope. In the general domain, most people would agree that AI writes code well.
Human programmers don't know much outside their own domain. But AI, while it loses in very narrow specialist areas, writes better code than humans across the broader range. It loses in the 1% zone (the expert's domain), but wins in the other 99%. Usually, when that's the case, you have two choices: become the 1%, or learn how to use AI.
Since I'm a non-native English speaker, I'm already at a disadvantage compared to native speakers in programming skills, so I chose the latter. But I still code. Not for any other reason—if I don't maintain at least some typing muscle, I won't be able to review AI code properly.
That's why I think coding is essential. Even if I can't understand the entirety of AI's output, I still need to understand the core business logic. At the very least, the core logic requires human understanding, so coding is necessary.
In my experience AI often overlooks generalizations of ideas iteratively arrived at. I need to give it the idea, that something could be generalized and nudge it, to arrive at the solution.
I imagine at competitive coding the goal is quite clear, but in a real world project, the goal is not always so clear, and especially in hobby projects the ideas and goals are not that clear. I get inspiration on how to improve my project or its usability, not the LLM. I instruct it to do something a specific way, because it doesn't do anything on its own, and I need to tell it what to generalize, which it failed to see, because it didn't consider a simplification which is technically less precise, but due to user context and human nature doesn't matter (in this case it was interpreting "now" to mean the current second, which is a small time range, instead of a mere point in time).
So it still takes a ton of hand holding in a more open project. I imagine, one could also code it up in the same amount of time. But it is good for generating tons of test cases. Though one will have to review those, and impose a test style on them, give examples and so on.
I agree. In fact, that's precisely one of the hardest parts of programming. Your thinking aligns with mine. I do a lot of equipment programming for factory delivery. I've even delivered an MES system before, to be precise, it was migrating a legacy MES to a modern version.
Beyond hobby projects, most clients often don't really know what they want. And that's generally what we call domain modeling. This is definitely an area where AI is weak. As you know, it mainly pulls from generic patterns.
When there are specific constraints, AI struggles with core business logic. And as you said, it's also weak at choosing the right direction or the goal to pursue. But as you also know, 80% of programming is built on what others have already created. Originality is only about 20%. And in that 80%, AI is absolutely dominant. I agree with you and I've upvoted your comment.
I don't write code anymore, because AI writes better code than me. I could write code, but the next AI would find 10 ways to make it better and more consistent with the rest of the AI-generated codebase. So I just let it write all of it. However, I inspect it all carefully and I constantly asks it to reflect on the code quality, to refactor, to reorganize, to make the code as good as possible. The end result is code that is much better than anything I could have written myself.
And I should mention that I have 30+ years of programming experience.
How do you improve, if you don't write code? How do you aim to close that gap, that is the 10 different ways of improving your code?
And if you don't aim to improve, how do you deem yourself capable of even reviewing AI code in say 3 to 5 years, when your code writing skill has fully atrophied?
I’ve stopped using llms to generate architecture, which i design and write myself and let the machine pattern match the gaps. I also use it to review issues which I lot of the times push back against.
I’m working on a stateful application sitting on top of a data warehouse and have to implement a stream of messy half defined feature requests and navigate on top of an ever changing infrastructure layer. LLMs rarely get the infra layer even if it is written as code and have hard time grasping how to deal with tech debt, when and how to re-architecture parts of the stack or even implement stuff based on a detailed openspec design.
To be honest, as you know, background knowledge is extremely important in programming. As you move into complex domains, the specifications multiply. So as a domain gets more complex, there comes a point where it exceeds my cognitive capacity. And that's when AI surpasses me and writes code I can't keep up with.
Usually, it produces code that would take three or four humans days to figure out—in just 20 minutes.
Even the professors and PhDs who hire me all use AI. Honestly, they hold PhDs and professorships, which puts them in a league I can't even touch—and even they use it. AI just does it really well.
Honestly, I learned from your book, 'rossant'—I never expected a programmer like you to say something like that. I thought my perspective was because I'm only an intermediate-level programmer. But you're in the 1% expert category I mentioned
If you think that everyone agrees on the "correct" way to use it, you're mistaken. If you think that your way is the best possible way to use it, you're arrogant. And if you think that the way you think is correct is obvious and that everyone should already know that's the right way, you're delusional.
It seems to me that AI won the code Battle and that humans are just trying to justify the defeat. I will relax and wait for the Next AI generation to see how it fixed its problems. May be, everything will be ok.
I've got a coin that answers questions. You have to give it a heads or tails query, then flip the coin, and it returns an answer. It's incredible. Now, it doesn't get the right answer every single time, but we're all learning how to use the new coin technology, and this is only the first generation of coin. The next model of coin is going to be even better. Soon we're not going to need humans any more, for any question we have, we'll be able to use the coin.
I have a coin that can tell you whether a program would halt or not. But it's not always right. I think it's a coin like you have? Still trying to figure out how to use it to prove that p=np.
The software factory is exactly what I'm building. The world is changing, we can either be the ones changing it or be forced to change afterwards.
"It’s about attention and understanding. To keep my attention, I must go beyond ‘read code’ like a passive observer of agents from afar. To really connect with the architecture of the system, it helps to truly experience the code"
I guess the funny answer that is behind this sentence is: You have to train your own mental model. We always argue about code in a very abstract and logical manner. But when coding the subconsciousness makes most of the decision ("this just feels right"). But for this to work you have to train it. And this does only work in a very limited way with code reviews or reading documentation. It requires repetition and deep focus.
When there is an issue in production with this mental model you will be able to point to the cause of an error message instantly. With generated code you'll search for a long time with your slow, conscious part of the brain.
For LLMs to be really helpful, they have to take over complete maintenance of the code. So you can treat them like an external library: Just assume it works. Otherwise this will always be problematic.
> For LLMs to be really helpful, they have to take over complete maintenance of the code. So you can treat them like an external library: Just assume it works.
We already tried this with humans. It works so poorly that it got the derogatory name “ivory tower architect”. It usually results in theoretical designs that are unworkable in the actual system, implementation teams (or LLMs) that work around the architecture and a lot of slowing down of velocity as the architect and implementers argue past each other.
This happens when the architect is out of touch. If the architect themselves works on the code, writes code, deals with the imposed restrictions, then the chances of that happening is much lower. Assuming, that they are a good architect.
I agree, if the architect participates in the implementation then they avoid this anti-pattern. That’s not compatible with hands-off autonomous agents where you treat implementation as a black box.
> With generated code you'll search for a long time
The observability people will claim that if the dynamic runtime behaviour of your system makes it hard to find the source of a behaviour, your system must be made more transparent and observable. They would also claim this was always the case -- we should never have relied on people's mental models being amazing because people move around.
(I don't know yet where I stand on this but I'm trying to learn more.)
If it was only "my" system without any integrations, I might agree.
But currently e.g. I am working on an MES/Scada layer that integrates data from a load of different machines in a factory. These machines are from China, Korea, Germany, Sweden ... Upwards there is an ERP integration (and some other systems).
Sometimes machines are updated and suddenly behave differently. Giving error messages in Chinese.
The ERP has the nasty behavior of returning error messages where it is not clear whether the actual processing actually happened or not. There are some heuristics on parsing the error messages, but these also change with new versions.
Sometimes one machine overloads cloud infrastructure and completely unrelated functionality fails.
Sometimes the on-premise network stops working for whatever reason and data is lost.
Sometimes operators do not understand a perfectly valid error message like: "The batch you loaded into input position XY has expired on XZ and cannot be used for production": "But we have been told to use it..."
So when you get called out at night, because the production line stopped and "MES is displaying an error message", it is mostly about finding out what integration failed and who else to wake up. Getting this right is very much appreciated by your colleagues.
And this is where you need a mental model of how things are connected, what error message happens because of what external causes etc.
Observability can only work perfectly for known problems. In a complex system for unexpected problem you can either provide too much data, so analyzing it and finding the relevant part becomes really hard, or too little data which makes finding the issue impossible.
There are so many companies claiming to provide the perfect observability solution and there are certainly solutions that help. But it is all very far from perfect.
Not relying on people is managers wet dream. And for a lot of people it might be true that they can be easily replaced. But for complex systems there are always some key people that you cannot replace without causing issues.
And here's the thing... juniors become seniors become experts, by doing this their entire career.
By having an understanding built during their entire career.
Right now we live in a fairly-land of mixed capacity. LLMs being used in parallel with skilled people. But as time progresses, there will be no more skilled people, because no one will learn and develop those skills.
If you're in the world of LLMs now, you are basically completely stalled in your personal growth in this field. You will never improve, and some seem to say they lose capabilities as they rely upon LLMs.
The world always changes. But the decisions being made today, are being made by skilled people.
What will the world look like, when it's just all "bro, lol, just tell it to make your thing" and then done?
The observability people are correct. It’s not either-or though.
I always hated writing code but loved debugging. LLM super charges systems thinkers & auditors, it’s just a different process and no different than copy and paste from stack overflow. It all comes down to the architecture design and LLM just exposes how bad people are at designing dynamic architectures.
> and no different than copy and paste from stack overflow
This isn't really the point of your comment, and for that I apologise, but: not all of us did that. For many good reasons, too.
> ... and no different than copy and paste from stack overflow.
It's even got a name: sloppy-pasta.
I'm not sure this is a good combination?
I mean you're basically saying it is a good thing if the LLM messes up so you have a reason to debug the code.
I need to write code because otherwise LLMs will write too much code, it’s only when you fully understand the problem you can generalise it enough to not end up with 10k lines and 5 abstraction layers for “hello world”. LLMs are token predictors, so all solutions are you tokens, the more problems to solve == the more tokens (code) to output.
LLMs love to defensively wrap code instead of thinking holistically about the big picture. That creates a lot of bloat.
A human coder might OTOH follow the Boy Scout rule and clean up as they go.
If tokens are the problem, SDD is the solution
> I need to write code because otherwise LLMs will write too much code, ...
I second that and I can give an example that happened to me yesterday with a totally SOTA model (a US, not Chinese model).
I needed to display an information on the client-side. Something trivial. I ask the LLM to do it. The thing went onto a rampage: it somehow found a way to pass the information from the server to the client during the initial handshake (already: why, just why?). Modifying both server-side code and client-side code. And it worked.
To an unsuspecting programmer/tester (or automated test)/user: the info is there, what was asked has been done. So it's perfect, flawless LLM victory right?
Except none of that sloppy-pasta was necessary: the info was already available on the client-side and was a one-line change, purely client-side.
These thing shall definitely, as of 2026, write way too much code.
And btw the companies selling metered tokens have a very serious incentive to produce the most complicated, rube-goldberg, solutions that use as many tokens as possible, while still kinda solving the problem.
That way not only you consume tokens to produce the code, but later on you consume tokens when working on that code (which btw is a guaranteed thing: for the LLM just introduced new bugs in that gargantic amount of crap it output).
Funnily enough the very same people who made fun of copy-pasta happen to be in love with sloppy-pasta. Go figure.
Unless you want some unmaintainable shitty sloppy app.
I think fragility is the key reason i intervene in llm code too. Good article.
> If we’re building a software factory, details matter. The details that establish architectural patterns. Down to algorithms and performance. Agents push us to evaluate, measure, and guard. They’ve made it cool to add CI into side projects early, not as an afterthought. That’s massive improvement to the state of software.
Why are you building a software factory though, and why weren't you immediately adding CI to every project?
> It’s our job to build the software factory - not just the software. Software engineers maintain the assembly line allowing anyone to prompt for a change and ship immediately.
Again, why? Where are you working where this is considered a good idea? This would mean that the software engineers are not just being completely kicked out of all business decisions, but asked to build a moat that ensures they stay on the other side of it.
Any business that intentionally devalues the insights gained through implementation will eventually starve itself to death by making too many passive thoughtless moves. No insight will ever be gained just spot checking AI. Is their intention really just to make tiny amounts of profit while riding the thing into the ground? Crabs in a bucket, man.
I still exclusively write my code. The quality is higher. I know exactly how it works. It’s more extensible. You don’t have to generate it.
In fact, not many people know that these days, but a human doing a thing by bashing their head against it, often tends to improve. My hand-written code is my best yet. My breadth of knowledge, wider than ever.
But the attraction of LLM code is not that you get quality.
The selling point is that you know have a quality Vs time tradeoff that is a lot better than you used to have.
I can spend 10 seconds typing out a prompt that will generate ok code.
Before a couple of years ago, it might have taken me an hour to type out and debug that code.
Sure, if you prefer low quality go ahead. Many people have always preferred low quality. Many people prefer to eat junk. I also genuinely believe that time tradeoff doesn’t matter.
> Before a couple of years ago, it might have taken me an hour to type out and debug that code.
Are you not running and testing your code?
It's just naive to say you are always going for quality. Everyone has constraints in money and time that they need to think about.
> Are you not running and testing your code?
Why would you think that?
> Why would you think that?
Because you’re claiming to not debug, and that you’ve gone from 1 hour to 10 seconds. I can only go off of what you tell me here.
In fact, it's better not to generate it imo. Like you said the quality is higher, and by the time I get done reviewing the LLM's output I haven't really saved time over just doing it myself. LLMs are only useful for things you can verify extremely quickly (like a short script), or for things where you don't care about the quality.
Turns out you internalize it when you write it and refactor it with iteration
This is too generic. There's some code I need to write like core abstractions that are going to set the pace for everything. Or tricky steps that can look good without actually working well.
Then there's the mass. I don't need that anymore. The mountains of boilerplate, etc.
I write little islands which need high judgement that are then connected by the obvious goo.
The boilerplate was always boilerplate though. You never needed to write it to already have that code in your project, so I'm confused by what you mean.
Generating boilerplate is strictly inferior than something already written and tested by the authors of the tools. You will eventually have to make slight adjustments to it, and those decisions can be just as impactful as your "high judgment" code. Those decisions are what actually enable your high judgment code to stay clean and straightforward.
Poor decisions in code architecture are some of the biggest blunders of all. Once you have begun to fill in the blanks on some boilerplate code, it ceases to remain boilerplate code. If you let AI make those adjustments, you will eventually blunder the codebase in precisely this way. You'll first recognize it when your high judgment code seems too verbose. You'll then soon realize some things are impossible without adjusting the boilerplate you started off with. Then the AI will fail to grasp what you want and you'll have to manually untangle a lot of the slop that you let grow out of control. Good luck with that.
this is the way
Prediction: in 2027 a coding agent will read this as inspiration for why it should code.
Do ppl think that programmers just write code from sratch each time..?!
Even without AI I barely write code. 95% of time are spend setting up integrations, configs, copying & adjusting code from previous projects.
+1, I don’t understand who these greenfielders are. Either I wait on the CI to finish, or I’m in a meeting.
lol what a slopper
"Why cook food in 2026 [while McDonald's exists]?"
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TL;DR: Write it so you’re actively involved and not a passive reviewer. Then a sign up link for his course.
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Recently, even a tourist lost to OAI's model in competitive coding. To be honest, I haven't been able to beat AI at coding since around 5.2. People often say 'AI can't write good code,' but in reality, the quality of AI's output is layered depending on the level of the prompt input. The deeper the prompt, the better the code actually gets.
Usually, when people say AI code is terrible, it's because they either don't understand the theory well but have grown through hands-on experience and can't explain things properly to the AI, or they don't know what they don't know. Or there are the very few who are just far better coders than AI. Some people will say they're among the rare few who can write better code than AI, and for some that may be true. But in my experience, the vast majority are not. Even from my perspective as a beginner, I could see flaws when I looked at their git code. It's a metacognition problem.
Realistically speaking, at the script level, it's quite common to see AI surpass human programmers as you increase the input level. You might disagree, but that's probably because you're a specialist in that field, deeply immersed in a very narrow area—it only holds true in that limited scope. In the general domain, most people would agree that AI writes code well.
Human programmers don't know much outside their own domain. But AI, while it loses in very narrow specialist areas, writes better code than humans across the broader range. It loses in the 1% zone (the expert's domain), but wins in the other 99%. Usually, when that's the case, you have two choices: become the 1%, or learn how to use AI.
Since I'm a non-native English speaker, I'm already at a disadvantage compared to native speakers in programming skills, so I chose the latter. But I still code. Not for any other reason—if I don't maintain at least some typing muscle, I won't be able to review AI code properly.
That's why I think coding is essential. Even if I can't understand the entirety of AI's output, I still need to understand the core business logic. At the very least, the core logic requires human understanding, so coding is necessary.
In my experience AI often overlooks generalizations of ideas iteratively arrived at. I need to give it the idea, that something could be generalized and nudge it, to arrive at the solution.
I imagine at competitive coding the goal is quite clear, but in a real world project, the goal is not always so clear, and especially in hobby projects the ideas and goals are not that clear. I get inspiration on how to improve my project or its usability, not the LLM. I instruct it to do something a specific way, because it doesn't do anything on its own, and I need to tell it what to generalize, which it failed to see, because it didn't consider a simplification which is technically less precise, but due to user context and human nature doesn't matter (in this case it was interpreting "now" to mean the current second, which is a small time range, instead of a mere point in time).
So it still takes a ton of hand holding in a more open project. I imagine, one could also code it up in the same amount of time. But it is good for generating tons of test cases. Though one will have to review those, and impose a test style on them, give examples and so on.
I agree. In fact, that's precisely one of the hardest parts of programming. Your thinking aligns with mine. I do a lot of equipment programming for factory delivery. I've even delivered an MES system before, to be precise, it was migrating a legacy MES to a modern version.
Beyond hobby projects, most clients often don't really know what they want. And that's generally what we call domain modeling. This is definitely an area where AI is weak. As you know, it mainly pulls from generic patterns.
When there are specific constraints, AI struggles with core business logic. And as you said, it's also weak at choosing the right direction or the goal to pursue. But as you also know, 80% of programming is built on what others have already created. Originality is only about 20%. And in that 80%, AI is absolutely dominant. I agree with you and I've upvoted your comment.
I really like your perspective
I don't write code anymore, because AI writes better code than me. I could write code, but the next AI would find 10 ways to make it better and more consistent with the rest of the AI-generated codebase. So I just let it write all of it. However, I inspect it all carefully and I constantly asks it to reflect on the code quality, to refactor, to reorganize, to make the code as good as possible. The end result is code that is much better than anything I could have written myself.
And I should mention that I have 30+ years of programming experience.
How do you improve, if you don't write code? How do you aim to close that gap, that is the 10 different ways of improving your code? And if you don't aim to improve, how do you deem yourself capable of even reviewing AI code in say 3 to 5 years, when your code writing skill has fully atrophied?
Can you explain what you are working on?
I’ve stopped using llms to generate architecture, which i design and write myself and let the machine pattern match the gaps. I also use it to review issues which I lot of the times push back against.
I’m working on a stateful application sitting on top of a data warehouse and have to implement a stream of messy half defined feature requests and navigate on top of an ever changing infrastructure layer. LLMs rarely get the infra layer even if it is written as code and have hard time grasping how to deal with tech debt, when and how to re-architecture parts of the stack or even implement stuff based on a detailed openspec design.
To be honest, as you know, background knowledge is extremely important in programming. As you move into complex domains, the specifications multiply. So as a domain gets more complex, there comes a point where it exceeds my cognitive capacity. And that's when AI surpasses me and writes code I can't keep up with.
Usually, it produces code that would take three or four humans days to figure out—in just 20 minutes.
Even the professors and PhDs who hire me all use AI. Honestly, they hold PhDs and professorships, which puts them in a league I can't even touch—and even they use it. AI just does it really well.
Honestly, I learned from your book, 'rossant'—I never expected a programmer like you to say something like that. I thought my perspective was because I'm only an intermediate-level programmer. But you're in the 1% expert category I mentioned
"The deeper the prompt, the better the code actually gets."
.... and in the and you end up with a very deep prompt that exactly specifies the behavior. This is what a programming language is.
I'd rather describe a data structure in a language designed for this task, than a prompt the might be interpreted in many different ways.
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AI is a tool. Learn how to use it!
Interesting article btw
> AI is a tool. Learn how to use it!
If you think that everyone agrees on the "correct" way to use it, you're mistaken. If you think that your way is the best possible way to use it, you're arrogant. And if you think that the way you think is correct is obvious and that everyone should already know that's the right way, you're delusional.
It seems to me that AI won the code Battle and that humans are just trying to justify the defeat. I will relax and wait for the Next AI generation to see how it fixed its problems. May be, everything will be ok.
I've got a coin that answers questions. You have to give it a heads or tails query, then flip the coin, and it returns an answer. It's incredible. Now, it doesn't get the right answer every single time, but we're all learning how to use the new coin technology, and this is only the first generation of coin. The next model of coin is going to be even better. Soon we're not going to need humans any more, for any question we have, we'll be able to use the coin.
I have a coin that can tell you whether a program would halt or not. But it's not always right. I think it's a coin like you have? Still trying to figure out how to use it to prove that p=np.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day :)