alt Hacker NewsI've spent a lot of time in my career as a SRE/DevOps which includes running MANY outages due to a combination of uncaught bugs and/or crazy infra failures. [0]
In my opinion, the basics of software engineering haven't changed, it's just faster to write the code.
e.g. the below plan is just applicable for humans or LLMs when building systems that are sensitive to small changes/errors and have catastrophic failure modes. (e.g. trading, avionics, health etc)
1. Have a very detailed plan of how you want it to work
2. Break the work into components
3. Work on each component and test the component extensively
4. Once that component is good, move on to the next component
5. Tie all those components together and confirm they work via integration tests etc
There is a STRONG temptation to just tell the LLM "Build me a system" but that is a bad idea and was also a bad idea with humans.
Sure, LLMs speed up #2 and possibly #3. For #3 specifically, almost all of the top developers I know are using LLMs to write the code but are writing the tests by hand or spending most of the time reviewing the test code written by LLMs. I would argue that this is how it should be.