Software engineers in general don’t seem to like LLM’s, a lot say it trivializes our work, or is not creative. I think honestly a lot of us are afraid about what that means for our jobs, and the future of the industry. And, maybe those fears are completely founded, likely though, we’ll just be expected to increase our productivity, since that, in the end, is the goal of all technology, and probably we will get more work, because people will create apps and then not be able to maintain them, and we all know the real work is in the maintenance. These fears are natural to human nature, people don’t like change. However if I categorize the types of complaints about llm coding in my opinion they seem to fall into 2 categories; don’t take away my art, and this is terrible code.
As much as we may feel that the code we write is beautiful, and it may be, the point of code is not to look beautiful, the point of code is to be maintainable, else it gets thrown away and someone else has to redo your efforts. The beauty of the code really is a side effect of, in my opinion, a cognitive bias; we as people tend to believe the things we make are beautiful.
We all think when we’re writing our code, and finally solving some problem that has been plaguing us, that our code is great, but how, often not even 6 months later do we come back to it and think, this is less than perfect? LLM’s writing code have the power to remove us from the trees and allow us to see the forest, scrutinize more, and I think, as a whole, make more functional code. How many of us are a lot more harsh (justifiably so) on LLM code than we would be on our own?
I love writing code not because code is an amazing thing to write, but because of the real world problems you can solve writing code. Sometimes it seems we become so in love with the art of writing code they forget the art isn’t there for arts sake, it’s there to evoke emotion, or in this case the code is there to make someone’s life or work easier. Unlike code though art has little to no intrinsic value, however, even if the code is crap if it solves a problem for people it has value. Losing focus of that ultimate goal is losing focus of why code exists in the first place.
Then there are those that claim AI slop, and I have to say, they’re right; ai does make slop all the time, but I will say, so do humans, and they are made in our image. People who have never built software will probably struggle, but also they will solve problems they have in their lives, and likely problems we have in ours as well. Those unfamiliar with software will make many apps, and crude attempts to validate the possibility of their idea, and they will want to expand, but they will find eventually, their apps unmaintainable and we will profit. The real skill is in figuring out how to translate real world problems into things that can be solved with software.
Any good tool that will be able to create as well as destroy if it is versatile enough. But if we can learn to tame the beast, and control it properly I think we will go very far. I myself have recently built apps in weeks that would’ve taken me 1 year or more before. Just like junior engineers I find llms full of energy, but needing guard rails in order to be the most effective.
With some great and thorough testing, that includes coverage tests, a sensible CLAUDE.md that tell Claude ways to solve problems you’ve seen it encountering, and slowing down making Claude make a plan that you read, you can get some amazing code out of Claude. Things that yes, with time, one could accomplish, but with this i just have to watch it like an overzealous engineer that has a history of taking down production. I should be able to add tests to make that almost impossible.
There has honestly I don’t think ever been a better time to be an engineer, people used to have physical punch cards, write machine code, and read entire manuals to learn how to use a command. And just look at us now, there was a time I couldn’t be on the internet while my mom was on the phone. Now we have code that writes code, better than most humans, we truly live in amazing times.
If I remember correctly, taxi drivers in London didn’t like it when GPS maps with directions came out, and elevator operators didn’t appreciate driver-less elevators. Will we simply be another point in history of people falling to the fear of technology? Probably, for now, but eventually, we’ll see.