[stpedgwdgfhgdd]

“The goal of software engineering is not to write code faster”

Writing proper code including tests and refactorings takes substantial time.

It is definitely worth it to do this faster, if only to get faster feedback to go back to the first phase; requirements and analysis.

I have experienced this myself, using CC it took me a few hours less to realise i was on the wrong track.

[skydhash]

Requirements are filters for the set of implementations. The only feedback is the count and the nature of the results. And what you usually do is to either abandoning it or restricting it further. Because the source of the requirements is the business domain which exist outside the technical domain.

Selecting one of the implementation over the other is design, aka making decisions. Sometimes you have to prototype it out to where which parameters is the best. And sometimes a decision can revert an earlier one and you have to investigate the impact radius of that change.

But coding is straightforward translation. The illusion of going faster is that we forego making decisions. Instead we're hoping that the agent makes the correct ones based on some general direction, forgetting than an inch deviation can easily turn into a mile error. The hopeful things would have been an iteration, adding the correct decisions and highlighting the bad ones to avoid. But no one have that kind of patience. And those that use LLMs often finish with a "LGTM" patch.

The normal engineering is to attain a critical mass of decisions and turns that immediately to formal notation which is unambiguous. Then we validate with testing if that abrupt transformation was done properly. But all the decisions were made with proper information.