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This is really interesting to me; I have the opposite belief. My worry is that any idiot can prompt themselves to _bad_ software, and the differentiator is in having the right experience to prompt to _good_ software (which I believe is also possible!). As a very seasoned engineer, I don't feel personally rugpulled by LLM generated code in any way; I feel that it's a huge force multiplier for me. Where my concern abou…
>For short-sighted management, this is all desirable since the sloppy output looks nice in the short term It was a sobering moment for me when I sat down to look at the places I have worked for over my career of 20-odd years. The correlation between high quality code and economic performance was not just non-existing, it was almost negative. As in: whenever I have worked at a place where engineering felt like a true…
But, I have definitely seen failure due to persistent technical mistakes, as well, especially when combined with human factors. There’s a particularly deep spiral that comes from “our technical leadership made poor choices or left, we don’t know what to invest in strategically so we keep spending money on attempted refactors, reorgs, or rewrites that don’t add more value, and now nobody can fix or maintain the core product and customers are noticing;” I think that at least two companies I’ve worked at have had this spiral materially affect their stock price.
I think that generative coding can both help and hurt along this axis, but by and large I have not seen LLMs be promising at this kind of executive function (ie - “our aging codebase is getting hard to maintain, what do we need to do to ensure that it doesn’t erode our ability to compete”).