alt Hacker NewsThat a coding agent or LLM is a different technology than a compiler and that the delta in industry standard workflow looks different isn’t quite my point though: things change. Norms change. That’s the real crux of my argument.
> But for hyping up the technology well beyond it's actual merits, antagonizing people who point out it's shortcomings, and subjecting the rest of us to worse code? Yeah, I hold that against the LLM fans.
Is that what I’m doing? I understand your frustration. But I hope you understand that this is a straw man: I can straw man the antagonists and AI-hostile folks but the point is the factions and tribes are complex and unreasonable opinions abound. My stance is that people can dismiss coding agents at their peril, but it’s not really a problem: taking the gcc analogy, in the early compiler days there was a period where compilers were weak enough that assembly by hand was reasonable. Now it would be just highly inefficient and underperformant to do that. But all the folks that lamented compilers didn’t crumble away, they eventually adapted. I see that analogy as being applicable here, it may be hard to see the insanity of coding agents because we’re not time travelers from 2020 or even 2022 or 3. But this used to be an absurd idea and is now very serious and highly adopted. But still quite weak!! Still we’re missing key reliability and functionality and capabilities. But if we got this far this fast, and if you realize that coding agent training is not limited in the same way that e.g. vanilla LLM training is by being a verifiable domain, we seem to be careening forward. But by nature of their current weakness, absolutely it is reasonable not to use them and absolutely it is reasonable to point out all of their flaws.
Lots of unreasonable people out there, my argument is simply: be reasonable.
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> Norms change. That’s the real crux of my argument.
Novelty isn't necessarily better as a replacement of what exists. Example: blockchain as fancy database, NFTs, Internet Explorer, Silverlight, etc.
As others has already been pointed out, not all new technologies that are proposed are improvements. You say you understand this, but the clear subtext of the analogy to compilers is that LLM driven development are a obvious improvement and if we don't adopt them we'll find ourselves in the same position as assembly programmers who refused to learn compiled languages.
> Is that what I’m doing?
Initially I'd have been reluctant to say yes, but this very comment is laced with assertions that we'd better all start adopting LLMs for coding or we're going to get left behind [0]
> taking the gcc analogy, in the early compiler days there was a period where compilers were weak enough that assembly by hand was reasonable. Now it would be just highly inefficient and underperformant to do that
No matter how good LLMs get at translating english into programs, they will still be limited by the fact that their input (natural language) isn't a programming language. This doesn't mean it can't get way better, but it's always going to have some of the same downsides of collaborating with another programmer.
[0] This is another red flag I would hope programmers would have learned to recognize. Good technology doesn't need to try to threaten people into adopting it.