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Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code

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Re: Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code

#51

Post by tkgally »

strangescript wrote: post #27

So many of these concepts only make sense under the assumption that AI will not get better and humans will continue to pour over code by hand. They won't. In a year or two these will be articles that get linked back to similar to "Is the internet just a fad?" articles of the late 90s.

A couple of those articles, in case anyone is interested:

“The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana” by Clifford Stoll (1995)

Excerpt: “How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.”

https://www.nysaflt.org/workshops/colt/2010/The%20Internet.p...

“Why most economists' predictions are wrong” by Paul Krugman (1998)

Excerpt: “By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.”

https://web.archive.org/web/19980610100009/http://www.redher...

Re: Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code

#52

Post by fragmede »

tgv wrote: post #33
injidup wrote: post #3

Shouldn't you be getting the LLM to also generate test cases to drive the code and also enforce coding standards on the LLM to generate small easily comprehensible software modułes with high quality inline documentation. Is this something people are doing?

I just wrote a reply elsewhere, but we got a new vibe-coded (marketing) website. How is an LLM going to write test cases for that? And what good will they do? I assume it will also change the test cases when you ask it to rewrite things.

> How is an LLM going to write test cases for that?

"Please generate unit tests for the website that exercise documented functionality" into the LLM used to generate the website should do it.

Re: Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code

#53

Post by rho4 »

simonsarris wrote: post #4

A softer version of this has existed since word processing and Xerox machines (copiers) took off, in law and regulations. Tax code, zoning code etc exploded in complexity once words became immensely easy to create and copy.

Nice pattern detection.

Re: Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code

#54

Post by daveaiello »

I started using LLMs to refactor and maintain utility scripts that feed data into one of my database driven websites. I don't see a downside to this sort of use of something like Claude Code or Cursor.

This is not full blown vibe coding of a web application to be sure.

Re: Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code

#55

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

strangescript wrote: post #27

So many of these concepts only make sense under the assumption that AI will not get better and humans will continue to pour over code by hand. They won't. In a year or two these will be articles that get linked back to similar to "Is the internet just a fad?" articles of the late 90s.

Two more weeks and "AI" will finally be intelligent. Trust the plan.

Re: Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code

#57

Post by lioeters »

mrkeen wrote: post #8

This was a pre-existing problem, even if reliance on LLMs is making it worse. Naur ( https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf ) called it "theory building": > The death of a program happens when the programmer team possessing its theory is dissolved. A dead program may continue to be used for execution in a computer and to produce useful results. The actual state of death becomes visible when demands for modi…

> theory building

That's insightful how you connected the "comprehension debt" of LLM-generated code with the idea of programming as theory building.

I think this goes deeper than the activity of programming, and applies in general to the process of thinking and understanding.

LLM-generated content - writing and visual art also - is equivalent to the code, it's what people see on the surface as the end result. But unless a person is engaged in the production, to build the theory of what it means and how it works, to go through the details and bring it all into a whole, there is only superficial understanding.

Even when LLMs evolve to become more sophisticated so that it can perform this "theory building" by itself, what use is such artificial understanding without a human being in the loop? Well, it could be very useful and valuable, but eventually people may start losing the skill of understanding when it's more convenient to let the machine do the thinking.

Re: Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code

#58

Post by notpachet »

bob1029 wrote: post #20
mrkeen wrote: post #8

This was a pre-existing problem, even if reliance on LLMs is making it worse. Naur ( https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf ) called it "theory building": > The death of a program happens when the programmer team possessing its theory is dissolved. A dead program may continue to be used for execution in a computer and to produce useful results. The actual state of death becomes visible when demands for modi…

> I suspect that there is a strong correlation between programmers who don't think that there needs to be a model/theory, and those who are reporting that LLMs are speeding them up. I have some anecdotal evidence that suggests that we can accomplish far more value-add on software projects when completely away from the computer and any related technology. It's amazing how fast the code goes when you know exactly what…

> It's amazing how fast the code goes when you know exactly what you want.

To quote Russ Ackoff[1]:

> Improving a system requires knowing what you could do if you could do whatever you wanted to. Because if you don't know what you would do if you could do whatever you wanted to, how on earth are you going to know what you can do under constraints?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqEeIG8aPPk

Re: Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code

#59

Post by Herring »

trjordan wrote: post #43

LLMs absolutely produce reams of hard-to-debug code. It's a real problem. But "Teams that care about quality will take the time to review and understand LLM-generated code" is already failing. Sounds nice to say, but you can't review code being generated faster than you can read it. You either become a bottleneck (defeats the point) or you rubber-stamp it (creates the debt). Pick your poison. Everyone's trying to bol…

> You … become a bottleneck (defeats the point)

It's better if the bottleneck is just reviewing, instead of both coding and reviewing, right?

We've developed plenty of tools for this (linting, fuzzing, testing, etc). I think what's going on is people who are bad at architecting entire projects and quickly reading/analyzing code are having to get much better at that and they're complaining. I personally enjoy that kind of work. They'll adapt, it's not that hard.

Re: Comprehension debt: A ticking time bomb of LLM-generated code

#60

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

BenoitP wrote: post #30
mrkeen wrote: post #8

This was a pre-existing problem, even if reliance on LLMs is making it worse. Naur ( https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf ) called it "theory building": > The death of a program happens when the programmer team possessing its theory is dissolved. A dead program may continue to be used for execution in a computer and to produce useful results. The actual state of death becomes visible when demands for modi…

> "theory building" Strongly agree with your comment. I wonder now if this "theory building" can have a grammar, and be expressed in code; be versioned, etc. Sort of like a 5th-generation language (the 4th-generation being the SQL-likes where you let the execution plan be chosen by the runtime). The closest I can think of: * UML * Functional analysis (ie structured text about various stakeholders) * Database schemas…

Prolog/Datalog with some nice primitives for how to interact with the program in various ways? Would essentially be something like "acceptance tests" but expressed in some logic programming language.
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