[alecbz]

Even ignoring determinism, with traditional source code you have a durable, human-readable blueprint of what the software is meant to do that other humans can understand and tweak. There's no analogy in the case of "don't read the code" LLM usage. No artifacts exist that humans can read or verify to understand what the software is supposed to be doing.

[luckydata]

yeah there is. it's called "documentation" and "requirements". And it's not like you can't go read the code if you want to understand how it works, it's just not necessary to do so while in the process of getting to working software. I truly do not understand why so many people are hung up on this "I need to understand every single line of code in my program" bs I keep reading here, do you also disassemble every library you use and understand it? no, you just use it because it's faster that way.

[notpachet]

> do you also disassemble every library you use and understand it?

Sometimes.

[alecbz]

> it's called "documentation" and "requirements"

What I mean is an artifact that is the starting point for generating the software. Compiled binaries can be completely thrown away whenever because you know you have a blueprint (the source code) that can reliably reproduce it.

Documentation & requirements _could_ work this way if they served as input to the LLMs that would then go and create the source code from scratch. I don't think many people are using LLMs this way, but I think this is an interesting idea. Maybe soon we'll have a new generation of "LLM-facing programming languages" that are even higher level software blueprints that will be fed to LLMs to generate code.

TDD is also a potential answer here? You can imagine a world where humans just write test suites and LLMs fill out the code to get it to pass. I'm curious if people are using LLMs this way, but from what I can tell a lot of people use them for writing their tests as well.

> And it's not like you can't go read the code if you want to understand how it works

In-theory sure, but this is true of assembly in-theory as well. But the assembly of most modern software is de-facto unreadable, and LLM-generated source code will start going that way too the more people become okay with not reading it. (But again, the difference is that we're not necessarily replacing it with some higher-level blueprint that humans manage, we're just relying on the LLMs to be able to manage it completely)

> I truly do not understand why so many people are hung up on this "I need to understand every single line of code in my program" bs I keep reading here, do you also disassemble every library you use and understand it? no, you just use it because it's faster that way.

I think at the end of the day this is just an empirical question: are LLMs good enough to manage complex software "on their own", without a human necessarily being able to inspect, validate, or help debug it? If the answer is yes, maybe this is fine, but based on my experiences with LLMs so far I am not convinced that this is going to be true any time soon.