alt Hacker NewsBecause humans are currently the bottleneck.
An LLM can produce far more code than a human can understand. And the famous rule that "optimizations are entirely pointless unless you're optimizing at the constraint" is logistics 101.
To accelerate software development, you either need to remove or lessen the need for code understanding, or make it much quicker for humans to gain that understanding. Making the LLM faster won't help you if the LLM isn't the bottleneck.
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A human can produce far more code than a human can understand, too, but pre-LLM we always viewed someone overwhelming their colleagues like that as being bad at their job.
I want to make better software, not more software. Making software development faster isn't necessarily the goal. Making it better in the many, many ways that matter (of which speed is just one part) is.
Humans could already produce more code than a human can understand. Even a single human in the pre-agentic era could produce more code than they could understand, certainly over a career and often even in the short term given the resources many companies give to maintenance.
A lot of old-school software engineering is about how to deal with this reality.