[mattlondon]

Well again that is just a "vibes" explanation with nothing concrete.

I feel like with LLMs, it's like a situation where you are close to some feature or project and have a pretty good idea in your head already of how you'd implement it yourself "I'd do this and have an API with that and a database table foo for storing bar with index on baz" and you're keen to get started on it ...but then someone else gets assigned to work on it not you.

They do it a totally different way than you would have thought of doing it, and the code feels alien and weird because it doesn't follow your "design" and decisions you already had in your head before they started work on it. Is it "bad" or just not how you'd have done it?

I think that is ok. So long as the code works and meets all stated requirements and is secure and performant and uses good abstractions and is not full of hacks, then it's ok to let go. Sure maybe you'd have done it a different way but ultimately that doesn't matter.

[Swizec]

> So long as the code works and meets all stated requirements and is secure and performant and uses good abstractions and is not full of hacks, then it's ok to let go

That is the problem. The code often is full of hacks and bad abstractions. LLMs write code like a junior or mid-level engineer – perfectly overfitted to today’s request. Oh you need to work on this code tomorrow and there’s a laundry list of future requirements? Throw away and rewrite, I guess.

You can most easily see this when you ask LLMs to write tests. They have a tendency to write convoluted tests that absolutely definitely pass. Even when you know the code has a bug, they’ll write the test in a way that fits the code as written and passes. Because they know tests should pass.

Getting an LLM to write a failing test against a currently working function because you know the business requirements have changed is like pulling teeth.

You don’t see writing about this stuff because it doesn’t neatly fit in an article or video (I’ve tried). Plus it goes against the zeitgeist so you’d never get traction (even if people write these posts, we don’t see them)

[gymbeaux]

The unit test example has been my team's experience as well. The unit tests look good on the surface, but their passing or failing has little predictive value on whether there are actually bugs in the code.

Some people have suggested you write the unit tests by hand to basically "check" the LLM's work and keep it honest, but to write good unit tests you have to understand the underlying code, which takes time (since you didn't write it), so to me this is another bullet point that suggests LLMs will eventually be relegated to "StackOverflow+" duty - give me snippets, but I'll still write effectively all the code.