alt Hacker NewsYes. That's how LLMs do programming, mostly. It's also why LLMs don't need abstractions or parsimony as much as humans. They can work on something complicated without simplifying it first.
This has major implications that haven't been fully realized yet. On the math side, there are long machine generated proofs. On the code side, there are high volumes of code with similar code not being folded into functions.
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I've been working on generating a large code base for the last couple of weeks. Finally got around to generating a sort of code-duplication report and have spent the last week just having it de-duplicating logic that had been strewn all over the place (eg 11 different functions all doing date math to add x days to a date). dozens of items that had each been similar functions duplicated numerous times. crazy. (opus-5-utracode)
This is the exact opposite of what I’ve been dealing with for awhile. LLMs absolute cannot work on something without an understanding unless they can outsource the understanding to a verifier. If you’ve got an easy to check function to measure progress then “keep going” is all the prompt you need. But if you need it to figure out “I pushed the up button and it moved up and left” then it’ll find the same bug five ways without realizing it’s just one bug in the underlying math.
LLMs use abstractions a ton in code though: standard library functions, popular libraries, etc. They just dont always make their own abstractions. At least not particularly good ones. LLMs work really well when they have well abstracted pieces to put together.
For greenfield projects LLMs don't need abstractions, but as the project gets more complex, the right abstractions save a pot on input tokens (less code to read) and reasoning tokens (less work to do to figure out the code), so they free the context window for higher purposes
Also I suspect that, apart from that, the results on smaller, cleaner codebases are better. LLMs degrade when following more than N instructions (where N depends on the model) even if the context window is not full yet; I suspect they also degrade when code has too many unnecessary concepts and details