Thanks to their LLM reliance they'd soon not know what it does, and forget even the little they know about coding
I wondered why people would video themselves going around slapping strangers in public then shouting "its just a prank bro" - turns out it works.
I’m actually of the mind it will be easier IF you follow a few rules.
Code maintenance is already a hassle. The solution is to maintain the intent or the original requirements in the code or documentation. With LLMs, that means carrying through any prompts and to ensure there are tests generated which prove that the generated code matches the intent of the tests.
Yes, I get that a million monkeys on typewriters won’t write maintainable code. But the tool they are using makes it remarkably easy to do, if only they learn to use it.
We had a bootcamp in our city that had all students build a GitHub portfolio. They all built the same projects like a TODO app. Every person’s code would like almost identical because they all did them together and, I suspect, copied from past grads.
They all applied to the same local jobs, too. So we’d get a batch of their resumes with GitHub links, follow the GitHub links, and see basically the same codebase repeated everywhere.
Now my bars are so massively higher, 99.95% of juniors who don't have pre-2024 work to show can forget about it.
I know someone in a senior engineering position at Epic who does nothing but clean up PR's from their off-shored Ukrainian sweat shop coders handing in AI slop because all they need to do is close a ticket to get paid. They wind up rewriting half or more of it. Epic doesn't seem to care so long as this "solution" works and saves them money by paying a few really smart people to code janitor until hopefully all of them can be replaced by LLMs.
For a company as financially focused as Epic it's surprising to me they'll pay the offshored devs for simply submitting code even if it doesn't work and needs to be rewritten.
I don't understand, are you threatening to avoid hiring talented people or just their brain dead management?
Resume glorification and LinkedIn / GitHub profile attention do that.
I am seeing a lot of people coming up with perceived knowledge that's just LLM echo chambers. Code they contribute comes straight out of LLMs. This is generally fine as long as they know what it does. But when you ask them to make some changes, some are as lost as ever.
Torvalds was right, code maintenance is going to be a headache thanks to LLMs.