alt Hacker NewsSome comments claim that "models are getting better over time" misses the point.
What does "better" even mean? Better at following instructions, or better at fixing everything on their own? If it's the latter, it's not progress, it's the model's behavior matching your preference.
Coding itself is deterministic, but code quality and the product aren't. A better model per se might solve the former, but there's no single better solution for code quality or product because it requires judgment per case, and that judgment depends on context that is unwritten or lives in people's heads.
Code quality matters. A coding agent is faster than a human at pattern matching, but a bad codebase is going to slow it down or, worse, point it in the wrong direction.
So a better model won't be enough. We need better processes.
I agree quality matters, but the writing is on the wall. It's only a matter of time before the frontier labs are training ultra-long-horizon software engineering tasks using agent teams in RL training loops that help the models essentially figure out what they're currently missing. It's going to happen. I think human judgement is needed today, but not in the limit. It's learnable. The only thing is figuring out the training loop to teach it. That's all.