[fnoef]

Very egocentric piece. Almost reads as “I’m so cool, I did so many cool things, and most things other people did is way worse than even the slop that my LLM prompting skills are capable to produce”.

Also “ You have to understand how things work, what is the best design, how to reach a certain level of performance.” - how does OP propose to understand how things work or what is the best design if you don’t actually go and build things or read the code? I hope the answer is not “reading mythical man month” or “watching YouTube video tutorials”.

[nimonian]

This is pretty unfair. If the author didn't establish some context there would be someone else here saying "Check out this dilettante telling me what to think."

I have a degree in mathematics followed by twenty years in software development (pillory me, if you like). My conclusions after 6 months of using LLMs every day are remarkably similar to the author's. I increasingly think in shapes, architectures, data structures and ideas; less and less in lines of code.

And I fully understand his point that, once the architecture of an idea is settled, reading LLM code does not feel worse than reading human generated code. Especially if you have a strong style and conventions guide.

The idea is the hard part, and it's the right place to focus your effort.

[fnoef]

I bet you had to solve math equations and prove math stuff to get your degree, am I right? Now imagine I tell you that you could have just prompted LLMs with “please solve the is and make no mistakes”, would you think you’d be able to get your math degree?

The point I’m trying to make is that it’s very easy to tell everyone “don’t read the code, just focus on architecture” when you have decades of experience behind your shoulders, where you HAD to read the code, iterate, learn from your mistakes, read code written by others, and actually writing and making stuff yourself to gain that experience and understand architecture.

How do you expect people to learn all this stuff that you know if don’t want them to actually do the work but instead “control the idea”, whatever this means? It’s just baffles me that people don’t see this.

[krupan]

I see it. I'm with you. It does feel lonely though, doesn't it?

[fnoef]

You made my evening a bit better by your message, kind stranger. It is lonely in there, but I suspect you know, just like me, that we can't chose a different path.