I don't see how this is sustainable. We have essentially eaten the seed corn. These current LLMs have been trained by an enormous corpus of mostly human-generated technical knowledge from sources which we already know to be currently being polluted by AI-generated slop. We also have preliminary research into how poorly these models do when training on data generated by other LLMs. Sure, it can coast off of that initial training set for maybe 5 or more years, but where will the next giant set of unpolluted training data come from? I just don't see it, unless we get something better than LLMs which is closer to AGI or an entire industry is created to explicitly create curated training data to be fed to future models.

I'm not really seeing this direction of travel. I hear a lot of claims, but they are always 3rd person. I don't know or work with any engineers who rely heavily on these tools for productivity. I don't even see any convincing videos on Youtube. Just show me on engineer sitting down with theses tools for a couple hours and writing a feature that would normally take a couple of days. I'll believe it when I see it.

My main gripe with this form of code generation is that is primarily used to generate “leaf” code. Code that will not be further adjusted or refactored into the right abstractions.

It is now very easy to sprinkle in regexes to validate user input , like email addresses, on every controller instead of using a central lib/utility for that.

In the hands of a skilled engineer it is a good tool. But for the rest it mainly serves to output more garbage at a higher rate.

> if this can be accompanied by an increase in software quality

That’s a huge “if”, and by your own admission not what’s happening now.

> other LLM agents reviewing code, feeding in compile errors, letting other LLM agents interact with the produced code, etc.

What a stupid future. Machines which make errors being “corrected” by machines which make errors in a death spiral. An unbelievable waste of figurative and literal energy.

> Then we will definitely start seeing more and more code produced by LLMs.

We’re already there. And there’s a lot of bad code being pumped out. Which will in turn be fed back to the LLMs.

> Don't look at the state of the art not, look at the direction of travel.

That’s what leads to the eternal “in five years” which eventually sinks everyone’s trust.

> The direction of travel is very clear

And if we get 9 women we can produce a baby in a single month.

There's no guarantee such progression will continue. Indeed, there's much more evidence it is coming to a a halt.

> Don't look at the state of the art not, look at the direction of travel.

That's what people are doing. The direction of travel over the most recent few (6-12) months is mostly flat.

The direction of travel when first introduced was a very steep line going from bottom-left to top-right.

We are not there anymore.

> I'm continually surprised by the amount of negativity

Maybe I'm just old, but to me, LLMs feel like magic. A decade ago, anyone predicting their future capabilities would have been laughed at.

That's the hype isn't it. The direction of travel hasn't been proven to be more than a surface level yet.

Because there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding producing a lot of nonsense.

Of course LLMs are a fantastic tool to improve productivity, but current LLM's cannot produce anything novel. They can only reproduce what they have seen.

> LLM based systems will be writing more and more code at all companies.

At Google, today, for sure.

I do believe we still are not across the road on this one.

> if this can be accompanied by an increase in software quality, which is possible. Right now its very hit and miss

So, is it really a smart move of Google to enforce this today, before quality have increased? Or did this set off their path to losing market shares because their software quality will deteriorate further over the next couple years?

From the outside it just seems Google and others have no choice, they must walk this path or lose market valuation.

> I'm continually surprised by the amount of negativity that accompanies these sort of statements.

I'm excited about the possibilities and I still recoil at the refined marketer prose.

I think that at least partially the negativity is due to the tech bros hyping AI just like they hyped crypto.