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 threadGlyphMar 7
@mjg59 do you have some way of evaluating that progress in the last 6 months in some way that is not the subjective impression of improvement?
Show threadMatthew Garrett
@glyph not at all, other than my occasional requests for the robot to write code for me getting increasingly close to code I'd be willing to deploy
Mar 7 at 3:00amWeb
Show threadGlyphMar 7
@mjg59 thanks. that kind of data is really hard to come by, so I am just asking everyone with this experience :)
Show threadgunstickMar 7
@glyph @mjg59
The machine is still not generating code I can use. Apparently it is not trained in bash scripting.
Show threadMike RoachMar 7
@mjg59 @glyph Same. I’ve asked it to write things that I know I can do but don’t want to context switch to that domain and it actually does a remarkably good job both at understanding what I’m trying to do, the constraints, and producing code that’s correct and performant.