I recently reviewed a large PR from a decent developer. I wrote some of the requirements after meeting with stake holders and did my own investigation on potential solutions.
The PR was full of bugs, missed half the requirements and the code that was there wasn’t even fully tested.
This person has successfully delivered complex things before. So what the hell? And this is not the first time I’ve thought their usage of agents and conclusions from ai assisted explorations were not right or could be better.
There’s still some weird human element. Though I’m noticing that responses are getting better with less “prompt engineering” so maybe this will all be gone soon.
Was this a developer who has been forced or pressured to use LLMs?
I know that should that time come for me, I'm not going to burn myself out wrestling to make something good.
LLMs are designed to circumvent our ability to tell who knows what they're talking about. Our fundamental intuition about computer programs - garbage in, garbage out - has been broken. Now everyone can sound the same. But those who do know what they're talking about understand it's just a tool, those who don't think they're like Neo and just learnt kung fu.