But I can see the carnage with offshoring+LLM, or "most employees", including so call software engineer + LLM.
LLM code is still mostly absurdly bad, unless you tell it in painstaking detail what to do and what to avoid, and never ask it to do a bigger job at a time than a single function or very small class.
Edit: I'll admit though that the detailed explanation is often still much less work than typing everything yourself. But it is a showstopper for autonomous "agentic coding".
This is hyperbolic, but the general sentiment is accurate enough, at least for now. I've noticed a bimodal distribution of quality when using these tools. The people who approach the LLM from the lens of a combo architect & PM, do all the leg work, set up the guard rails, define the acceptance criteria, these are the people who get great results. The people who walk up and say "sudo make me a sandwich" do not.
Also the latter group complains that they don't see the point of the first group. Why would they put in all the work when they could just code? But what they don't see is that *someone* was always doing that work, it just wasn't them in the past. We're moving to a world where the mechanical part of grinding the code is not worth much, people who defined their existence as avoiding all the legwork will be left in the cold.
Maybe a bit, but unfortunately sometimes not so much. I recently had an LLM write a couple of transforms on a tree in Python. The node class just had "kind" and "children" defined, nothing else. The LLM added new attributes to use in the new node kinds (Python allows to just do "foo.bar=baz" to add one). Apparently it saw a lot of code doing that during training.
I corrected the code by hand and modified the Node class to raise an error when new attributes are added, with an emphatic source code comment to not add new attributes.
A couple of sessions later it did it again, even adding it's own comment about circumventing the restriction! X-|
Anyways, I think I mostly agree with your assessment. I might be dating myself here, but I'm not even sure what happened that made "coding" grunt work. It used to be every "coder" was an "architect" as well, and did their own legwork as needed. Maybe labor shortages changed that.
My personal beef is the human devs get "make me a sandwich", and the LLM superfans now suddenly know how to specify requirements. That's fine but don't look down your nose at people for not getting the same info.
This is happening now at my company where leadership won't explain what they want, won't answer questions, but now type all day into Claude and ChatGPT. Like you could have Slacked me the same info last year knuckleheads...
You can provide it with a tool to do that. Agents run tools in a loop, give it good tools. We have linters, code analysers, fuzzers and everything else.
Configure them correctly, tell the agent to use them (in painstaking detail) and it can't mess things up.
> LLM code is higher quality than any codes I have seen in my 20 years in F500.
And in my French brain, code or codebase is countable and not uncountable.
There is a countable "code" (just like "un café" is either a place, or a cup of coffee, or a type of coffee), and "un code" would be the one used as a password or secret, as in "j'ai utilisé tous les codes de récupération et perdu mon accès Gmail" (I used all the recovery codes and lost Gmail access).
But what set me off is an universal qualifier: there was no code seen by you that is of equal quality or better that what LLMs generate.
If that's obvious to you than you're just being rude. If it's not obvious to you, then you'll also find this is a common deviance (plural 'code') from those who come from a particular primary language's region.
Edit; This got me thinking - what is the grammar/rule around what gets pluralized and what doesn't? How does one know that "code" can refer to a single line of code, a whole file of code, a project, or even the entirety of all code your eyes have ever seen without having to have an s tacked on to the end of it?
As for the grammar rule, it's the question of whether a word is countable or uncountable. In common industry usage, "code" is an uncountable noun, just like "flour" in cooking (you say 2 lines of code, 1 pound of flour).
It's actually pretty common for the same word to have both countable and uncountable versions, with different, though related, meanings. Typically the uncountable version is used with a measure of quantity, while the countable version denotes different kinds (flours - different types of flour; peoples - different groups of people).
Well, the grammar is that English has two different classes of noun, and any given noun belongs to one class or the other. Standard terminology calls them "mass nouns" and "count nouns".
The distinction is so deeply embedded in the language that it requires agreement from surrounding words; you might compare many [which can only apply to count nouns] vs much [only to mass nouns], or observe that there are separate generic nouns for each class [thing is the generic count noun; stuff is the generic mass noun].
For "how does one know", the general concept is that count nouns refer to things that occur discretely, and mass nouns refer to things that are indivisible or continuous, most prototypically materials like water, mud, paper, or steel.
Where the class of a noun is not fixed by common use (for example, if you're making it up, or if it's very rare), a speaker will assign it to one class or the other based on how they internally conceive of whatever they're referring to.
As if author of the comment had not seen any code that is better or of equal quality of code generated by LLMs.