[giraffe_lady]

> This makes me wonder if one day we will see artisan software developer (I mean, the idea of software craftmanship is already here). LLM&Co are good at outputting a lot of code very quickly, but they are often not good at producing quality code.

The reason I think we might not see this for software even though we do other goods is that the output of a developer is not code it is software. It's possible for good (fit for purpose, easy to use, fast, pretty, whatever metric) software to be built on bad code. The craft of the code is not necessarily apparent in the product in the same way it can be with physical goods.

Whether or not LLMs can consistently output "good" software is less clear to me and I'm not interested in trying to make a prediction about it. But if they do I don't see "hand crafted" code being a thing. No one cares about code.

[fragmede]

Those who write code do care about the code though, if only because it makes their job harder when the code is complete shit. It might be like welding, where only another welder can appreciate a good weld, and spot oxidization and shitty welds and judge the welds as being good/bad. If there's some janky software that desperately wants to be refactored/rewritten, then (LLM written or not) fellow programmers should rightly judge the code as being crap and choose to stay away from it or refactor it into being better. It might be, as pointed out, functional code, and the end user might not notice (or they might; shitty code is brittle and prone to having bugs), but all else being equal, if there are two products and one has shitty code and one is beautifully architected, I know which one I'd rather use, assuming the state of the code is known.

[Tadpole9181]

> Those who write code do care about the code though

Woof, our careers have brought us across very different coworkers.