@plexus In the end, software engineering is about creating solutions to problems other people have. The solutions are not a byproduct, but the primary purpose. To the majority of users, the inner workings and the creation process of software is opaque. The qualities that software exposes on the outside are largely independent of its inner workings.

This means that for most people in the software industry, adapting to the new tooling that makes the creation process more efficient is 1/

@hanshuebner You are replying to Rich Felker, primary developer of the musl C library for Linux, a shining example of software at a low layer of the stack developed with meticulous attention to quality. True, quality that business people probably don't appreciate, but if software at all layers were developed with this attention to quality, I think users would feel the difference.

@dalias @plexus

@matt @dalias @plexus Is the reality not that not all software is developed with meticulous attention to quality? In my experience, most software is primarily written with the intent to solve a problem. The engineering challenge is to make it maintainable as requirements evolve. Success is when the software fulfills its purpose.

I love writing beautiful code, but don't expect anyone to pay me for it - not only because beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but also because users don't care.

@hanshuebner @matt @plexus Software written without any concern that it's doing the wrong thing does not "solve any problem" except "how to line venture capitalists' pockets".

Unless it's just being written for fun and not actual deployment to real-world applications, software is responsible for people's safety.

It controls deadly machines like cars and airplanes.It's used to design buildings and bridges. It guards people's communications against abusive partners, stalkers, governments. It controls people's money. It controls who gets need-based benefits. It decides whether people will be wrongly accused of embezzlement and driven to suicide.

@hanshuebner @dalias (Dropping the original author as they already warned you that they're in no mood for your arguments.)

IMO, code is not something to be cranked out en masse. Every detail matters; as such, we should write every line deliberately, with care, as the clearest, most direct expression of our understanding of how to solve the problem, certainly clearer and more precise than a natural-language prompt.

@matt @dalias "Our understanding" is often incomplete, leading to code that is just a reflection of the process of understanding the task at hand. Code often suffers from that in that the person working on it learned faster than they could or would refactor. The resulting reality is that code, by and large, is messy.

Not everyone is working the same way, but it is certainly true that not everyone is a genius. Thus, bad, human code prevails.

@dalias @matt I live in capitalism as a software developer. I don't get to choose what tools I use, I'm getting paid to do the work. I can change my profession, or I can pick up what I need to know in order to sustain myself. This is me personally.

Then: LLMs create code that is comparable to human written code in that frame of reference. There is better code, but there is also much worse.

Finally: LLMs create shitty prose, shitty images and shitty music. I hate all of that.

@matt @dalias You are absolutely right, but here's the thing: Code review also does not prevent subtle bugs from creeping into the code base when humans wrote the code. Review is just one of the tools that ensure software quality.

This is to say that code written by LLMs and humans suffer from similar issues, require similar care and review and can fail in similar ways. There is more LLM code, though, and there are new challenges because scaling with LLMs works differently than with humans.

@matt @dalias Statistically, you will have more bugs because you have more software. But also, you can easily create tests, refactor and make executable requirements.

Making good software with LLM support is hard work and takes time. If you look at the stuff that people make with three prompts and then post to LinkedIn, you know what I mean.

A good program requires attention to detail, no matter what the tool does for you.