[jevndev]

I think the key to understanding why people want this is that those people care about results more than the act of coding. The easy example for this is a corporation. If the software does what was said on the product pitch, it doesn’t matter if the developer had fun writing it. All that matters is that it was done in an efficient enough (either by money or time) manner.

A slightly less bleak example is data analysis. When I am analyzing some dataset for work or home, being able to skip over the “rote” parts of the work is invaluable. Examples off the top of my head being: when the data isn’t in quite the right structure, or I want to add a new element to a plot that’s not trivial. It still has to be done with discipline and in a way that you can be confident in the results. I’ll generally lock down each code generation to only doing small subproblems with clearly defined boundaries. That generally helps reduce hallucinations, makes it easier to write tests if applicable and makes it easier to audit the code myself.

All of that said, I want to make clear that I agree that your vision of software engineering Becoming LLM code review hell sounds like… well, hell. I’m in no way advocating that the software engineering industry should become that. Just wanted to throw in my two cents

[overgard]

If you care about the results you have to care about the craft, full stop.

[fzeroracer]

Probably the most unfortunate thing is that the whole AI garbage trend exposes how little people care about the craft leading to garbage results.

As a comparison point I've gone through over 12,000 games on Steam. I've seen endless games where large portions of it are LLM generated. Images, code, models, banner artwork, writing. None of it is worth engaging with because every single one has a bunch of disjointed pieces shoved together combined.

Codebases are going to be exactly the same. A bunch of different components and services put together with zero design principal or cohesion in mind.