alt Hacker NewsI’m unclear what has been gained here.
- Is the work easier to do? I feel like the work is harder.
- Is the work faster? It sounds like it’s not faster.
- Is the resulting code more reliable? This seems plausible given the extensive testing, but it’s unclear if that testing is actually making the code more reliable than human-written code, or simply ruling out bugs an LLM makes but a human would never make.
I feel like this does not look like a viable path forward. I’m not saying LLMs can’t be used for coding, but I suspect that either they will get better, to the point that this extensive harness is unnecessary, or they will not be commonly used in this way.
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> - Is the work faster? It sounds like it’s not faster.
The author didn't discuss the speed of the work very much. It is certainly true that LLMs can write code faster than humans, and sometimes that works well. What would be nice is an analysis of the productivity gains from LLM-assisted coding in terms of how long it took to do an entire project, start to finish.
I have a feeling that the real work of writing a complex application is in fully understanding the domain logic in all its gory details and creating a complete description of your domain logic in code. This process that OP is going through seems to be "what if I materialize the domain logic in tests instead of in code." Well, at first blush, it seems like maybe this is better because writing tests is "easier" than writing code. However, I imagine the biggest problem is that sometimes it takes the unyielding concreteness of code to expose the faults in your description of the domain problem. You'd end up interacting with an intermediary, using the tests as a sort of interpreter as you indirectly collaborate with the agent on defining your application. The cost of this indirection may be the price to pay for specifying your application in a simpler, abstracted form. All this being said, I would expect the answers to "is it easier? is it faster?" would be: well, it depends. If it can be better, it's certainly not always better.