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Don't you mean extinct?

fabiensanglard.net

141–145 of 145 posts

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but it lets you iterate faster. Who hasn't come up wit the most perfect elegant design, only to come up against three reality of implement and an "oh we forgot about that" aspect. Except by then, it's too late to change, so you march on. Writing code faster lets you find the things you didn't think of faster so then you get to design it again but better this time.

That sort of trial and error design seems like a really unprofessional way of working.

It used to be, before LLMs. It was standard practice though.

If you have a bad design that's had contact with reality for a while, it's much easier to make it actually good, rather than figure stuff out up front (I've rarely made this work, even though I'd love to).

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#142
post #44

With the improvements that AI has made in just the last year, it should be obvious to anyone that code written by an AI will at some point stop being "AI slop" and be better than the majority of coders are able to put out. Reduced to its basics, all code is just characters put into a sequence. Similar to chess or Go, both of which, it was claimed at one point or another, would be impossible for a computer to beat a h…

LLMs are statistical prediction machines, they're always going to produce the most "average" code because they reproduce what they're trained on. Average code is bad , and it's going to get a lot worse as people's skills degrade and the training set degrades. If the code isn't readable to humans, there's no particular reason to think it's going to be magically readable by LLMs either.

They predict the "most likely" token given the context. That's a huge caveat. Just putting "this is excellent code" in the context makes a vanilla LLM do better. Doesn't that make you pause for a moment before asserting hard limits on what they're capable of?

You might argue they're still capped at the "best" quality seen in the input. Not so. Take typos. Human text has a certain base rate of typographical errors. LLM output contains almost none. Why? Because there are many more ways to be wrong than right. LLMs are not just averaging machines, they also denoise. That should also give you pause.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#143
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many dependencies do you review the source code of?

The expectation is that someone has already done that with a dependency. If the code has just been sharted out by an LLM, it has by definition been reviewed or even understood by no one.

There is nothing about a LLM 'sharting out code' that blocks it being reviewed or understood by a human.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#144
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of HN'ers are in denial. I was an LLM skeptic check my history if you like. At the beginning of 2026 LLMs shifted over the hump to as good or better than most devs and are continuing to get better. I don't think we've even begun to see how this is going to affect the industry. People in charge don't and never have cared about code quality, tech debt, maintainability. Now they will not only not care but…

I agree. Denial only takes you so far. At some point, the devs that insist on outdated working practices (at least ones the boss regards as such) will be replaced by younger people who either don't know about them, or like their boss, don't care. They will just generate code that passes the tests also written by the AI, ask the AI to find any bugs, and so long as the code runs without obvious issues, that will get re…

I think we are heading towards an AI apocalypse of disengagement. Like in that Idiocracy movie where the computer lays off the entire company because profits are down and not even the CEO can undo it because he got laid off too.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#145
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Denial only takes you so far. At some point, the devs that insist on outdated working practices (at least ones the boss regards as such) will be replaced by younger people who either don't know about them, or like their boss, don't care. They will just generate code that passes the tests also written by the AI, ask the AI to find any bugs, and so long as the code runs without obvious issues, that will get re…

I think we are heading towards an AI apocalypse of disengagement. Like in that Idiocracy movie where the computer lays off the entire company because profits are down and not even the CEO can undo it because he got laid off too.

Company I work with laid off half of workere based on claudes advice, complete strategy is AI based, all presentations, decks, plans, every document and communication coming from the higher ups. New CEO and CTO were brought in to improve the situation and their decision was to lean on AI as much as possible. They started with internal employees then contractors, now are refactoring services to new APM, there's a plan to refactor codebase to third Lang (after it historically already changed stack)...
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