Laurence TrattOne of the interesting consequences of LLMs/agents is that the short-term costs of boilerplate in code have plummeted. An interesting question is whether those costs are simply shunted to the future or whether they are permanently reduced.
Per Vognsen@ltratt I'd say the short-term costs of boilerplate were always very low. But yes, they certainly have an appetite for spewing that stuff.
@pervognsen Before good code navigation, I think the short term costs were surprisingly high. I remember working out the (approximate) productivity of programmers in the "Java Enterprise Beans" era and it was not pretty (in no small part because looking up what boilerplate was needed was hard). But I agree, short term boilerplate costs have been on a downwards trajectory for some time even before LLMs.
Ian Wagner@ltratt @pervognsen completely agree here. Many if the things I hear people using LLMs for are things like this. Which frankly modern IDE tooling does better overall, esp in the past 10 years or so.
@ianthetechie @pervognsen I think this is overstating it. LLMs can do very different things to even the best IDE / LSP. Whether those things turn out to be useful over time is, IMHO, something we will find out in due course.
@ltratt @pervognsen yeah fair enough. I agree they are different. An IDE / LSP can’t give more than surface level understanding of code at a glance. LLMs can thrn code into plain English. And it’s pretty reliable for smallish sections of code even spanning multiple modules. (Breaks down pretty quickly when you get into weeds but this is still valuable).
But on the other hand, IDE tools / LSPs are significantly more reliable at understanding relationships, static analysis, refactoring, etc.