Re:Bad ideas that aren't bad anymore
by camgunz on Thursday November 12, 2026 @04:32AM
(#50464993)
N-version isn't a new idea. You quickly run into a problem with evaluation. Fuzzing is slow, non-deterministic, expensive. Building and verifying a test suite similarly so. Building a program that will evaluate whether an arbitrary program conforms to an arbitrary spec is an unsolved problem (consider how you would verify such a program in the first place).
People keep thinking of the coding step as a discrete, and thus also slow, expensive, non-deterministic step, but engineers did a lot to make it less so, whether it was techniques, tools, process, culture, whatever. Like, imagine an incredibly good agent working on a 2kloc PR for ~120 hours, periodically checking in with 4-5 other also incredibly good agents with near perfect knowledge of the system they're working on, constantly reevaluating the approach, periodically considering whether the existing codebase and architecture can facilitate the types of functionality you're adding, spending considerable effort to make it as easy as possible for other agents to add features, improving itself through these efforts, building ideas for new tools to help it, etc etc. It wasn't just code generation; so many useful things were happening in parallel.
You can think of it like dating in a huge city. In smaller cities incidental contact is frequent and encouraged. Dating is a bunch of meet cutes, dating in the workplace, ad hoc get togethers, etc. In huge cities incidental contact is overwhelming, oppressive, and discouraged, so if you want to meet people you have to expend considerable energy deliberately doing something you used to get relatively for free: talking to people you may want to socialize with/date/whatever. It's of course possible and people do it, but it's much harder, and we're only starting to become aware of the second order consequences of it (loneliness epidemic, growing political separation between men and women, falling fertility rates, etc). It's to the point where getting into a relationship as an adult is a part-time job, and fewer and fewer people can bring themselves to put forth the effort.
Swapping in LLMs for humans for the code generation process has the same dynamics. You can have more meetings about architecture, you can have it slop out more tools, you can have it analyze the last N PRs and have it slop out something that would've made those PRs smaller/simpler/whatever, you can have it rearchitect whatever you want (kinda) but you have to constantly push yourself to do it. You're no longer internally motivated to do it because you're no longer personally affected, fewer and fewer engineers will be able to put in the effort, and things will start to fall apart.
Maybe this won't be a problem. Maybe the code will be good enough and we'll find we don't need these higher level operations, i.e. we won't need engineers to spend weeks doing tedious tech debt sweeps every quarter in order to keep the lights on. But my guess is our ambitions will grow until we do.
People keep thinking of the coding step as a discrete, and thus also slow, expensive, non-deterministic step, but engineers did a lot to make it less so, whether it was techniques, tools, process, culture, whatever. Like, imagine an incredibly good agent working on a 2kloc PR for ~120 hours, periodically checking in with 4-5 other also incredibly good agents with near perfect knowledge of the system they're working on, constantly reevaluating the approach, periodically considering whether the existing codebase and architecture can facilitate the types of functionality you're adding, spending considerable effort to make it as easy as possible for other agents to add features, improving itself through these efforts, building ideas for new tools to help it, etc etc. It wasn't just code generation; so many useful things were happening in parallel.
You can think of it like dating in a huge city. In smaller cities incidental contact is frequent and encouraged. Dating is a bunch of meet cutes, dating in the workplace, ad hoc get togethers, etc. In huge cities incidental contact is overwhelming, oppressive, and discouraged, so if you want to meet people you have to expend considerable energy deliberately doing something you used to get relatively for free: talking to people you may want to socialize with/date/whatever. It's of course possible and people do it, but it's much harder, and we're only starting to become aware of the second order consequences of it (loneliness epidemic, growing political separation between men and women, falling fertility rates, etc). It's to the point where getting into a relationship as an adult is a part-time job, and fewer and fewer people can bring themselves to put forth the effort.
Swapping in LLMs for humans for the code generation process has the same dynamics. You can have more meetings about architecture, you can have it slop out more tools, you can have it analyze the last N PRs and have it slop out something that would've made those PRs smaller/simpler/whatever, you can have it rearchitect whatever you want (kinda) but you have to constantly push yourself to do it. You're no longer internally motivated to do it because you're no longer personally affected, fewer and fewer engineers will be able to put in the effort, and things will start to fall apart.
Maybe this won't be a problem. Maybe the code will be good enough and we'll find we don't need these higher level operations, i.e. we won't need engineers to spend weeks doing tedious tech debt sweeps every quarter in order to keep the lights on. But my guess is our ambitions will grow until we do.