[grasbergerm]

It's fine if people don't want to use AI for anything, and honestly I don't even believe you need to justify it. The justification given here is interesting and I think shows misunderstanding.

At one point the author writes

> AI is a tool that can only produce software liabilities

which I would argue is completely caused by misuse of AI. Sure, you can have AI write a ton of code that often comes with subtle bugs. But using AI doesn't mean that it has to write any code for you at all. I've been using LLM often for security analysis and the results are quite good. Vulnerabilities that we had collectively missed were shown and we could fix them ourselves.

In this case, instead of creating liabilities, we were able to use LLM to get more information about our code. It's completely possible we could have deduced this information on our own, but we didn't and LLM is capable of doing it much more quickly than humans.

[anon22981]

I suspect people with opinions like the author’s haven’t been in a project where people use LLMs responsibly. We had a senior dev basically just prompt and push, with very little overseeing and minimal instructions, causing so many bad PRs and even prod bugs. That made me a sceptic for many months about agents.

Then we started to have (myself included) people actual plan out the tasks for the bot: give good specs, good ac, file context, better self-review, better ”agentic practices” (i.e. asking it to review it own work can sometimes help), and suddenly I noticed you really can use agents in a real world 1mil LOC project. If you do it well and responsibly (also meaning you still retain some sense of ownership and actually review the shit)

[Anthony261]

Nope. My point is not about the quality of the generated code, it's the fact that it was generated. No matter how good it is it will always be a liability without the accompanying asset which is the understanding produced by undertaking the effort of writing the code. Generated code is exclusively cognitive debt. It is also, by definition, legacy code since no one wrote it.

[nh23423fefe]

These are just bad definitions then? Not persuasive arguments. That just isn't what a liability is nor debt nor legacy.

[queenkjuul]

Look I hate AI "prose" and "art" with a deep passion, and i refuse to let an LLM touch my documentation, but this idea that you can't use an LLM to write decent code that you genuinely comprehend is outdated. Many developers choose not to, but that doesn't mean it's not possible.

I have coworkers who use an LLM who can explain and defend every line of every PR. I also have coworkers who just prompt and pray. Only one camp is producing genuine liabilities.