[layer8]

> If you're using llms to shit out large swathes of unreviewed code you're doing it wrong

> bam, x days work done in 2 minutes

This is a bit of a misrepresentation, since those two minutes don’t account for the reviewing time needed (nor prorperly, which vastly exceeds that time. Otherwise you end up in the situation of “doing it wrong” described in your first paragraph.

[appease7727]

Most of these cases don't require "review". It either works or it doesn't.

If you have an LLM transform a big pile of structs, you plug them into your program and it will either compile or it won't.

All programmers write countless one-off throwaway scripts. I can't tell you how many times I've written scripts to generate boring boilerplate code.

How many hours do you spend reviewing such tools and their output? I'll bet anything it's just about zero.

[the_af]

What do you mean "reviewing" throwaway tools and scripts? If you wrote them yourself, presumably you understand what they do?

I've also spent countless hours debugging throwaway scripts I wrote myself and which don't work exactly like I intended when I try them on test data.

[tjr]

Working in aerospace, code generation tools are indeed reviewed pretty thoroughly.

[p1necone]

The implication with that example was it's some editor thing for use during the dev process separate from the actual product, so it doesn't matter if it's disposable and unmaintainable as long as it does the thing you needed it for. If the tool becomes an integral part of your workflow later on you stop and do it properly the second time around.

[dymk]

It’s not a misrepresentation, they’re saying the time it would take to write the code has been reduced to two minutes, not the reviewing and everything else (which still takes just as long)

[seba_dos1]

Reviewing the code you didn't write takes much longer than the one you did.

[scarface_74]

Reviewing code another person wrote also takes longer than code I wrote. Hell reviewing code I wrote six months ago might as well be someone else’s code.

My job right now depending on the week is to either lead large projects dealing with code I don’t write or smaller “full stack” POCs- design, cloud infrastructure (IAC), database, backend code and ETL jobs and rarely front end code. Even before LLMs if I had to look at a project I did it took me time to ramp up.

[seba_dos1]

> Reviewing code another person wrote also takes longer than code I wrote.

Yes, and water is wet, but that's not exactly relevant. If you have an LLM generate slop at you that you have to review and adjust, you need to compare the time this whole process took you rather than just the "generating slop" step to the time needed to write the code by yourself.

It may still save you time, but it won't be anywhere close to 2 minutes anymore for anything but the most trivial stuff.

[JustExAWS]

I have been developing a long time - 10 years as a hobbyist and 30 years professionally. For green field work especially since all of the code I write these days are around the AWS SDKs/CDKs, I find the code is just as structured as what I would write.

The only refactoring I ended up doing on my current project is extracting functions from a script and creating a library that I reused across other functionality.

Even then I just pasted the library into a new ChatGPT session and told it the requirements of my next piece of functionality and told it to use the library.

I don’t trust an LLM to write more than 200 lines of code at the time. But I hardly ever write more than 200-300 lines at a time.

I can tell you that my latest project has around 1000 lines of Node CDK code between multiple apps (https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/) and around 1000 lines of Python code and I didn’t write a single line of any of it by hand and from reviewing it, it didn’t make any choices that I wouldn’t make and I found some of the techniques it used for the CDK code were things I wouldn’t have thought about.

The SQL code it generated for one of the functions was based on my just giving it the inbound JSON and the create table statements and it didn’t idiomatic MySQL, with parameters (ie no sql injection risk) and no unsafe code.

This was a 3 week project that I would have at least needed one if not two junior/mid level devs to do without Gen AI. Since I also had to be in customer meetings, write documentation and help sells on another project coming up.