[yakattak]

It’s the hype cycle. Are LLMs going to become invaluable to software engineering? Definitely. Are they going to do everything everyone on X says they will? Probably not. Right now we’re in the peak of inflated expectations.

Anecdotally I’ve been using Claude to help me write a C# CLI tool from scratch. The more lines I let it write, the less and less I understand the code. Can I copy/paste it and it works? Probably 90% of the time. When I have to go and fix it, it is a huge burden.

When I prompt it to do one singular function, it’s amazing. That’s a clear and concise unit to understand.

[perrygeo]

This matches my experience. There's a place for LLMs in exploratory research. There's a place for LLMs in scaffolding code that would otherwise be too tedious to write.

But where real decisions need to be made by those with "skin in the game", LLMs are a disaster. Vibe coding quickly falls off a cliff. They create code architectures that no human would given the context, and as a result no human can feasibly understand or maintain them long term.

I would say this is boon to real software developers - tons of apps that need an expert to maintain, it's job security, right? Well, no. I suspect, rather than maintain these LLM-generated monstrosities, most organizations will just let them rot. That was the default in the golden age of zero-interest engineering, that's the default in the golden age of vibe coding too.

[leray_J]

When it's too rotted, organizations plan to replace the whole system and pay 10x the price of what it would have cost to do it right in the first place, costly migration consulting mission, bullshit stuff and noise everywhere. The mid/long-term game is where the opportunity lies if you are a dev. The cycle is kind of safe for software engineer to me. Jus there won't be a place for HTML/CSS integrator, untalented PHP dev copy / pasting of random PHP function from SO anymore as it use to be 15 years ago. Those are cooked.