On the degree the software evolves and will be used.
The reason we've spent years discovering patterns, creating special syntaxes has been to tackle certain domain problems more efficiently and to have systems that can evolve through time.
The only constant is change.
Albeit LLMs chunk out code (and with great know how impressive output), the developer must have the know how to pass a certain threshold.
Writing in unknown languages may seem fine at first. But once you go to the edge, you'll be finding certain quirks, inefficiencies along the way that the LLM may work around it instead of removing it from root.
For example, I've been learning Effect.ts for some weeks now. I've used LLMs extensively, but before that there were a series of manual coding rounds first.
To understand composability, the nitty gritty, where things break, how, how the syntax is formed, and how could I structure some observability challenges I had around the library.
If I hadn't gone through that process, the code quality would be subpar. It wouldn't have been evident at first, but once the system would begin to evolve and adapt to feedback, things would be brittle, existing customers would be affected, and more.
I don't even know any more. I wanted a weather bapp that shows the whole forecast on one page with no scrolling, so I was ambitious and asked anti-gravity to build one for me. Half an hour later, done. Then I asked codex to review it and half the stuff didn't even work, made up wind gust data, misaligned hourly data, polluted caches. So I asked codex to fix the issues. Did it? I don't even know, it said it did.
The way to use AI is to make sure it has clear, verifiable success criteria, test suites, etc. Make sure any output has citations, reduce the need for trust to zero, etc.
I see people one shot stuff and it makes no sense, is completely fake half the time, just like you point out.
It should be the case that Codex and Claude Code should incorporate this kind of thing automatically at some point.
In my personal experience, agentic coding wasn’t useful, but using a chat inference, was. I still need to be the critical path, but the LLM has, indeed, become a major force multiplier.
A few minutes ago, I submitted an app for review, that I started work on, alone, in February. The Quality of the new version is astounding. I’m absolutely thrilled.
It’s a full rewrite (backend server, and frontend client) of a fairly large app that’s been shipping for a couple of years, and that took over two years, to originally write.
I wouldn’t have even tried it, without an LLM. That made all the difference. The majority of the work was done with the $20/month ChatGPT Plus subscription, but the last few days, as I developed supporting materials and Web sites, I used the $100/month Pro level. After my work, over the last few months, the upgrade was a “no brainer.”
But, at every step of the way, I needed to be there, to intimately review and manage the interaction with the LLM. There’s no way that I could trust it to “just do it.”
I’m sure that, sooner or later (likely sooner), LLMs will have progressed to the point that I can trust them to vibe-code a project like this, but I guarantee, that they aren’t quite there, yet.
To be fair, I know that I may have much higher standards than a fairly significant number of developers, but the end product of my work is about as far from “AI slop” as you can get.
When it's your own codebase that you know intimately, you obviously don't want it polluted, and you want to continue to understand everything that's there. For rewriting things you understand perfectly, or porting code to different platforms, the LLMs truly are a force multiplier. But that's so different from the way they are used on new projects. Letting them make design decisions is the problem. To make design decisions, you have to understand the system as a whole.
Seriously? I've explained this many times, but I assume that doing background research before insulting isn't a "modern" thing to do. Just Ready, Fire, Aim. Seriously, you could probably use ChatGPT to make a decent guess.
The issue is that the app addresses a specific (very privacy-aware) demographic. Each signup is manually vetted by two admins. It will probably never have more than a couple of thousand users, and the ones that are there, are more than a little [justified] paranoid.
Having several thousand curious geeks, do throwaway signups, just so they can see that the app is not for them, is not going to be helpful, so I never mention it here. If anyone really wants to know about it, I'm easy to contact. Unlike lots of folks, here, I am quite open about who I am.
The app, itself, is closed-source, but uses a significant number of open-source dependencies (that I also wrote -sometimes with AI help), which are easy to see.
AI can roll you crypto far better than what humans have built by hand. They can literally test things to an extent that no human ever would.
On the degree the software evolves and will be used.
The reason we've spent years discovering patterns, creating special syntaxes has been to tackle certain domain problems more efficiently and to have systems that can evolve through time.
The only constant is change.
Albeit LLMs chunk out code (and with great know how impressive output), the developer must have the know how to pass a certain threshold.
Writing in unknown languages may seem fine at first. But once you go to the edge, you'll be finding certain quirks, inefficiencies along the way that the LLM may work around it instead of removing it from root.
For example, I've been learning Effect.ts for some weeks now. I've used LLMs extensively, but before that there were a series of manual coding rounds first.
To understand composability, the nitty gritty, where things break, how, how the syntax is formed, and how could I structure some observability challenges I had around the library.
If I hadn't gone through that process, the code quality would be subpar. It wouldn't have been evident at first, but once the system would begin to evolve and adapt to feedback, things would be brittle, existing customers would be affected, and more.
I like to move fast without breaking things
build your own framework, database, operating system, game engine etc
things that used to be infeasible (too hard, too big, …)
I see people one shot stuff and it makes no sense, is completely fake half the time, just like you point out.
It should be the case that Codex and Claude Code should incorporate this kind of thing automatically at some point.
In my personal experience, agentic coding wasn’t useful, but using a chat inference, was. I still need to be the critical path, but the LLM has, indeed, become a major force multiplier.
A few minutes ago, I submitted an app for review, that I started work on, alone, in February. The Quality of the new version is astounding. I’m absolutely thrilled.
It’s a full rewrite (backend server, and frontend client) of a fairly large app that’s been shipping for a couple of years, and that took over two years, to originally write.
I wouldn’t have even tried it, without an LLM. That made all the difference. The majority of the work was done with the $20/month ChatGPT Plus subscription, but the last few days, as I developed supporting materials and Web sites, I used the $100/month Pro level. After my work, over the last few months, the upgrade was a “no brainer.”
But, at every step of the way, I needed to be there, to intimately review and manage the interaction with the LLM. There’s no way that I could trust it to “just do it.”
I’m sure that, sooner or later (likely sooner), LLMs will have progressed to the point that I can trust them to vibe-code a project like this, but I guarantee, that they aren’t quite there, yet.
To be fair, I know that I may have much higher standards than a fairly significant number of developers, but the end product of my work is about as far from “AI slop” as you can get.
as always: no code, no link, not even a description.
Incoming reasons: possible doxx, "internal", etc. pp.
Seriously? I've explained this many times, but I assume that doing background research before insulting isn't a "modern" thing to do. Just Ready, Fire, Aim. Seriously, you could probably use ChatGPT to make a decent guess.
The issue is that the app addresses a specific (very privacy-aware) demographic. Each signup is manually vetted by two admins. It will probably never have more than a couple of thousand users, and the ones that are there, are more than a little [justified] paranoid.
Having several thousand curious geeks, do throwaway signups, just so they can see that the app is not for them, is not going to be helpful, so I never mention it here. If anyone really wants to know about it, I'm easy to contact. Unlike lots of folks, here, I am quite open about who I am.
The app, itself, is closed-source, but uses a significant number of open-source dependencies (that I also wrote -sometimes with AI help), which are easy to see.
And that's all I'll say.
Have a great day!