I don't understand what trust means in this context. Even if I were able to hire Donald Knuth to write all my code, I wouldn't "trust" it to be bug-free, let alone to be the right fit for my needs.
It’s quite clear from the blog post that LLM was used for something that was:
- nice to have but clearly not important enough to invest time in
- definitely not worthwhile paying someone to do
- not going to hurt anything or anyone if it wasn’t implemented as close to what was envisioned.
If you read between the lines then trust may also mean privacy, if you’re furthering the goal of some company that may be stealing your data for training even when they say they are not because there are legal loopholes that allows them to get away with it, etc.
Your example of hiring Donald Knuth to write your code doesn’t fit into what’s being said about trust either. If you were never going to trust anyone to write your code, it doesn’t matter who it is anyway.
For most of us, even if we are engineers, chances are hiring someone legendarily good at writing code to requirement will produce far better results than what we knew we could achieve.
I would trust someone who is that good to write the code — more than myself — to do things I want to do it better than I can while being able to catch all the things that didn’t realize I needed.
> Donald Knuth's code would be much more likely to meet my standards during a code review than some LLM output.
Just to nitpick - will it actually? I don't know what your relationship with Donald Knuth is, but to the extent I'm familiar with him and his approach to work, I would expect that even if I could afford him, I would not be able to get him to agree to accept my coding standards, whereas I found that LLMs (although flawed in many ways) can be cajoled relatively effectively to adopt my particular standards.
- nice to have but clearly not important enough to invest time in
- definitely not worthwhile paying someone to do
- not going to hurt anything or anyone if it wasn’t implemented as close to what was envisioned.
If you read between the lines then trust may also mean privacy, if you’re furthering the goal of some company that may be stealing your data for training even when they say they are not because there are legal loopholes that allows them to get away with it, etc.
Your example of hiring Donald Knuth to write your code doesn’t fit into what’s being said about trust either. If you were never going to trust anyone to write your code, it doesn’t matter who it is anyway.
For most of us, even if we are engineers, chances are hiring someone legendarily good at writing code to requirement will produce far better results than what we knew we could achieve.
I would trust someone who is that good to write the code — more than myself — to do things I want to do it better than I can while being able to catch all the things that didn’t realize I needed.