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The article misses the point that LLMs are not removing the bottleneck of writing code for people who know how to write code . It's removing this bottleneck for everyone else.
I have yet to see anyone who previously could not write code be able to do so, beyond simple scripts, with LLM's.
Not only did they produce about the same amount of code in a day that they used to produce in a week (or two), several other things made my work harder than before:
- During review, they hadn't thought as deeply about their code so my comments seemed to often go over their heads. Instead of a discussion I'd get something like "good catch, I'll fix that" (also reminiscent of an LLM).
- The time spent on trivial issues went down a lot, almost zero, the remaining issues were much more subtle and time-consuming to find and describe.
- Many bugs were of a new kind (to me), the code would look like it does the right thing but actually not work at all, or just be much more broken than code with that level of "polish" would normally be. This breakdown of pattern-matching compared to "organic" code made the overhead much higher. Spending decades reviewing code and answering Stack Overflow questions often makes it possible to pinpoint not just a bug but how the author got there in the first place and how to help them avoid similar things in the future.
- A simple, but bad (inefficient, wrong, illegal, ugly, ...) solution is a nice thing to discuss, but the LLM-assisted junior dev often cooks up something much more complex, which can be bad in many ways at once. The culture of slowly growing a PR from a little bit broken, thinking about design and other considerations, until its high quality and ready for a final review doesn't work the same way.
- Instead of fixing the things in the original PR, I'd often get a completely different approach as the response to my first review. Again, often broken in new and subtle ways.
This lead to a kind of effort inversion, where senior devs spent much more time on these PRs than the junior authors themselves. The junior dev would feel (I assume) much more productive and competent, but the response to their work would eventually lack most of the usual enthusiasm or encouragement from senior devs.
How do people work with these issues? One thing that worked well for me initially was to always require a lot of (passing) tests but eventually these tests would suffer from many of the same problems
Was anyone claiming it is the bottleneck? Seems like a straw man.
A few weeks ago people were discussing here how their typing speed was making them code faster. On the other hand I haven't been limited by writing code, the linked article match my professional experience.
Speed is part of fluency and almost a shortcut to explaining the goal in real terms. Nobody is hunting and pecking at 80wpm.
Was anyone claiming it is the bottleneck? Seems like a straw man.
A few weeks ago people were discussing here how their typing speed was making them code faster. On the other hand I haven't been limited by writing code, the linked article match my professional experience.
Improving typing speed from "fast" to "faster" is very difficult. I think it's worth distinguishing between "typing faster is not useful" and "it's not worth the effort to try to type much faster".
There are sometimes cases where it's worth paying a high cost even for some marginal benefit.
Was anyone claiming it is the bottleneck? Seems like a straw man.
Loads of business people also think that code is some magical incantations and somehow clicking around in menu configuring stuff is somehow easier.
For a lot of people reading is hard but no one will admit that. For years I was frustrated and angry at people because I didn't understand that someone can have trouble reading while they are proper adult working business role.
I also see when I post online how people misread my comments.
Even without LLMs, we were approaching a point of saturation where software development was bottlenecked by market demand and funding, not by a shortage of code. Our tooling has become so powerful that the pure act of programming is secondary. It's a world away from when the industry began. There's a great story from Bill Gates about a time when his ability to simply write code was an incredibly scarce resource. A co…
>Even without LLMs, we were approaching a point of saturation where software development was bottlenecked by market demand and funding, not by a shortage of code I think it's credible to say that it was just market demand. Marc Andreessen's main complaint before the AI boom was that "there is more capital available than there are good ideas to fund". Personally, I think that's out of touch with reality, but he's the…
Also, he's a VC, but where more funding even in pure software is needed are sustainable businesses that don't have ambition to take over the world, but rather serve their customer niche well.
TBH, I feel like the biggest help Cursor gives me is with understanding large-ish legacy codebases. It's an excellent (& active) "rubber duck". So I'm not sure the argument holds - LLMs don't just write code.
Who thought lazy devs were the bottleneck? The industry needs 8x as much regulation as it has now; they can do whatever they want at the moment lol.
The article misses the point that LLMs are not removing the bottleneck of writing code for people who know how to write code . It's removing this bottleneck for everyone else.
I have yet to see anyone who previously could not write code be able to do so, beyond simple scripts, with LLM's.
As a programmer I can see all the rough edges but that doesn't seem to bother the other 99% of people on the group who use it.