I know someone is going to tell me I’m just “doing it wrong”, or bragging but, I’ve written some *extremely basic* code this week with an LLM (I know I know, but it was mandated that I *try*).

I am absolutely certain I could have written this faster myself.

“Yes hello, I would like to wait ~2 minutes for you to generate a code change I could have done in seconds with the built-in refactoring tool of any modern IDE” is truly a statement dreamt up by the utterly deranged.

Feeling super “accelerated” as I sit here… patiently waiting… shitposting on the internet… instead of doing the work I could have been doing.

But hey, those tokens won’t use up themselves!

Oh phew, someone else on the team built a “Slop Detection” “skill” for the LLM so now it will magically stop being a statistical model and instead be a statistical model with ✨ slightly different inputs ✨.

Thank you kind stranger, I couldn’t have done it without you.

Okay I actually timed it: 8 minutes and 40 seconds to delete 13 lines and add 4.

I sure hope my promotion prospects aren’t based on lines of code / hour, or I’m in real trouble compared to my baseline.

But it’s okay, because the LLM promises those 17 lines changes aren’t slop. It spent 3 minutes making sure they aren’t slop.

Motherfucker, I could have told you in 0.3 seconds.

“Oh but the real speed gains come from having swarms of them working in parallel”:

1. Conservatively, at this rate I would need 20 “agents” working in parallel to get the speed anywhere near my level.

2. I don’t have 20 changes I want to make to my code, so that isn’t plausible.

3. Have you tried integrating 20 merge conflicts? Hint: It takes longer than you think. But okay, we can just account for that additional slowdown by having *40* agents work in parallel except then we need to integra…

4. Sam Altman’s panties are wet just thinking about you paying for a swarm of agents. And I for one don’t want that image in my head.

“Auto generate your tests” they say. “At least skip doing the boring part”:

1. The tests are the fun part of TDD, thank you very much.

2. These tests are… about what I would expect from a very junior dev. They cover *maybe* 20% of the actual code paths.

@philip this is one case where “AI” can help a bit. I took over a test-free codebase, and getting a few tests in place was a useful crutch to get some semblance of a safety net in place quickly. The tests are naive and repetitious, but give me a toe hold, and the sooner I replace or delete them the better. TDD’s benefits aren’t just the tests, and it saddens me that so many developers don’t think beyond that, or so it seems to me.