[bluegatty]

That's a very good way to describe what they do (better than 'AI') but ironically, it really well explains the mechanism, and how they are in fact able to 'code so well' which is contrary to the authors own premise.

Agents code extremely well.

They're not particularly good at 'architecture' and I think that's where his specific concerns about 'not being able to see the problems' arise - the issues are are almost never in the syntax, because the AI writes perfect code. The issue is that it's not doing exactly what you intended.

Instead of 'missing the target' ... it's 'hit the wrong target perfectly'.

Any senior developer working with AI daily should be able to have a baseline intuition for all of this, and would therefore reject the hyperbole of the premise 'it can't code!'.

Of course it's producing gargantuan amounts of slop - that's not because 'it can't code', that's something else entirely.

[bigstrat2003]

> Of course it's producing gargantuan amounts of slop - that's not because 'it can't code'

That is precisely because it can't code! Or rather, it's because it can't reason, or understand things, which in turn means it can't code. The output of LLMs is sloppy because they have no understanding of what they are doing.

[bluegatty]

"Airplanes don't fly, humans do!"

People are hallucinating on this thread.

That people will say 'Code Me An App' and expect some kind of magical results, will be more common than not, but it's no way evidence that the AI can't code.

Given a sufficiently detailed prompt, the AI will produce almost whatever you ask it within a certain scale.

As sure as the sky is blue.

And it will make perfectly compilable code usually on the first prompt.

Obviously, it can code.

Obviously, it can 'synthetically reason' about the code.

You can point it an arbitrary code base and it will give a better overall assessment than most humans.

Is it fallible? Obviously. Is it limited in scope? Obviously.