[NateEag]

Whether or not he's serious, as someone who's grudgingly using Claude at work due to mandates, the productivity gains do shrink massively (and sometimes go negative) if you actually attempt to gain the level of understanding you'd have of the system had you written it yourself.

Does it matter if the developers understand the system they maintain?

I guess that depends whether the genAI maximalists turn out to be right.

[pfannkuchen]

What happens when there’s an outage though? Just hope the LLM can fix it? Who is on the hook if it can’t?

Do you have people frantically trying to reverse engineer a basically unfamiliar-to-them code base at 2am while bleeding cash?

[NateEag]

As far as I can tell, yes, the workflow is "assume the LLM can fix it."

I've certainly seen people on this site defend that idea vociferously.

I won't tell you it's impossible - Claude does do legitimately amazing things.

It does not, however, seem to me to actually have deep understanding of what it's doing. "Amazing" does not mean "admirable" or "trustworthy."

[pavel_lishin]

> Does it matter if the developers understand the system they maintain?

Are they maintaining it if all they do is type prompts into Claude?

[NateEag]

Yes, they are.

They may be doing a poor job of it - time will tell.

But, at present, they're still the ones merging PRs and deploying changes to production.

[pavel_lishin]

It brings to mind the Chinese Room argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

If a person in a Chinese Room doesn't actually understand Chinese, though the system as a whole behaves as if it does - can we say that the engineer merging PRs and deploying to production understands the system or maintains it?