LLMs will be an interesting test of the current broken systems at most large companies. You can literally fire your entire engineering team and replace them with your "really smart" cousin and Claude. And that's going to be mighty tempting when the MBA mantra seems to be that cost reductions this quarter are infinitely more important than any potential costs in the future. But of course they're not.
But in this case, they seem to have skipped that as well.
If not, company is not viable and will crash badly soon. Market forces and all that.
No one at any company has ever understood every bit of the stack they ship; see all the bugs AI is finding in all the frameworks and libs we been shipping this whole time; oh yeah we sure knew what we were shipping.
git pull [email protected]:allofit/allthethings.git engineering patterns is what created this mess to begin with
I've seen people build great software but fail to evolve it.
All the lessons from agile, clean code, TDD and testable architectures, CI/CD, DevOps are really about building software that can evolve, yet most of those get ignored from time to time due to cost (frequently called time) pressures.
GenAI stresses this loop even more, and no human can effectively deal with the level of output you need to fit in to continue effectively shipping. This can only mean more bugs rather than fewer bugs.
Yes, in a well executed project, LLM agents can bring immediate value and find and fix bugs: because the system has the good feedback loop built in. As soon as you lose that (over shorter time with LLMs than with humans), it starts getting exponentially worse.
And this is all even before you stop and think if you are even building the right thing.
It’s exhausting, but so often, my mush-brain has to concede that it has a point.
On any given day, several hundred decisions in to what I’d imagined would be a sensitive but straightforward spec, I’m keenly tempted to just accept its default judgements…
By now, I’ve encountered the whole of all 3 official bodies’ standards in anger. For sure that’s not the same as real understanding or hard-earned experience. But I sure understand the formalities of the problem space a hell of a lot better than I did when I started this particular vibe coding adventure.
Contrast with my young friend whose approach was “make me a first person shooter, in Los Angeles, I want {some kind of weapon} and cars, make it super polished and fun”. And his follow-ups along the lines of “I don’t care, make it awesome, whatever’s most awesome.” I hate to say he’s holding it wrong (as he did get some sort of Unity/Godot thing out of it), but… does my neuroticism elevate my LLM-hectored coding out of “vibe” territory?
At the very least, if these are indeed different groups of morons, one group is shutting up whenever the other is spewing their flavor of bullshit.