Hard not to get reactive being on mastodon and seeing the incessant llm-coding sucks and everybody using it is incapable of thinking posts. Did you folks also do that when the personal computer / google search / IDEs came out?
Every step which makes it easier to build on top of existing abstractions without having to understand them fully just means that you have new abstraction layers to contend with. What this looks like when code generation is powered by “language in a box” is something we have no real idea how to do yet. But a take like “people keep throwing BASIC on their PC until it works, kids will be dumb and never learn real programming” (replace with google search etc…) have aged quite badly, even if harboring a nugget of truth.
#llms slopcore approaches that are currently making the rounds are the industry fumbling with finding ways to use the tech, the same way we had rational rose powered craziness in the 90ies or the JavaScript explosion of the late aughts.
Software engineering at scale (think company wide, over years) resembles llm slopcore quite a bit, and we have developed techniques to deal with them (CICD, code review, rfcs, scrum, new languages, git, etc…) as software increasingly had to deal with scale (say, because of GitHub and ease of collaboration).
Now we need to find ways to compress this further into the languages and workflows of the future. I spend about 99% of my time doing architecture, and I’m able to try out 5 different approaches to complex problems I would never have been able to do before, simply because of the sheer effort of encoding these ideas.
Ive been building so many complex systems now that looking back at my career before llms looks like naive scripting. One concrete example: a friend wanted to control 2 relays and a rgb led matrix for an art installation. I was able to build over the weekend: a js interpreter running realtime tasks on top of freertos threads with pubsub events, with a REST api and a react frontend to edit said JS, with timesync over custom mesh protocol, with BLE iPhone app and full GUI + js editor on multiple esp32 nodes. 😱
#llm #vibecoding