Matthew GarrettMar 7

My job as a senior developer with a team of juniors is to figure out what to write, sketch a PoC as guidance, and then delegate the actual implementation to them. I'm going to look at that, explain misunderstandings or poor style choices, and guide them into implementing something that meets our standards.

I don't think LLMs can do my job yet. But I think we're getting shockingly close to them being able to do the other part. And I'm worried how we're going to get more senior developers.

Show threadMatthew GarrettMar 7
I would not have said the same thing 6 months ago - the amount of progress here is significant. And I'm not denying that the technology has resulted in massive quantities of poor quality code produced by people who aren't in a position to review it, or that the externalities of all of this are large. But capitalism isn't going to give a shit, so we're getting all of this anyway whether we like it or not
Show threadBrian Swetland

@mjg59 I dunno. Sure we'll get a lot of (more) terrible apps, services, etc in the short term. "AI" is sort of accelerating the "everything is unreliable slop-ware" trend that's been infecting software development for the past decade plus.

At some point I suspect there may (once again) be a market for software that's not utter garbage.

I feel bad for everyone stuck working for these awful companies (increasingly *all* companies), while the industry destroys its capability to write software.

Mar 7 at 2:28amWeb
Show threadVal Packett 🧉Mar 7
@swetland @mjg59 hilariously tho we just aren't seeing any new successful startups built on "vibed" code, it's all headlines from big corps like Microslop about how "AI" writes like 80% of their code already and blog posts about building a clone of a web page to do $thing that's been done a hundred times, but… nothing in between????? As Ed Zitron likes to ask: where are the startups??
Show threadBrian SwetlandMar 7
@valpackett @mjg59 Yeah I'm pretty strongly on team "if this is such a miracle technology why are they expending all their effort trying to convince others to use it rather than building things that couldn't possibly by built without it?"