dimonomid

I do find the LUO support really interesting, especially in the context of Orphaned VMs.

Yes, LLM is a tool. And CEOs of the tech companies are retaining developers not because there is value in writing code by hand, it's because developers can use that tool effectively and responsibly: they can tell bad code from good code, they design the solution, let AI do the hard boring work of coding it out, then these developers check its output, test it, also they can be creative and e.g. ask LLM to review LLM's output, etc etc.

But the need to manually type stuff out arises very infrequently in my experience. It happens but it's an exception, not the rule.

Yeah, can't agree more, and my experience is pretty much the same as you describe.

Yeah a small amount of manually-written code still makes sense, when it's faster to write it than to tell LLM to write it.

In particular comments. I'm not a fan of the comment style LLM tends to write, so I often just write them manually.

And also coming up with the right architecture is also often manual job. Design how to implement things, and let LLM implement it.

Of course checking the LLM's output and testing it and iterating on it is factored in. And yeah that verification and testing and iteration where most of the time goes, and still it ends up being significantly faster than typing everything manually, and the end result quality is often higher I believe.

To avoid fighting with the LLM to get right, it's useful to first come up with the architecture manually, run it by the LLM first (without writing any code - just talking to it, asking it to find flaws in your architecture), and once both you and LLM are happy with the plan, fire it to execute. This step removes a lot of friction (but not all of it - later iterations are still almost always necessary)

Yeah if it's done as part of learning effort, then I def agree.

True, but having written enough (from many years of doing it full time), the returns from writing more are diminishing.

But yes I agree that as part of learning effort it's important to write, too.

It's very important to understand what's happening, sure. Blindly shipping AI-produced code without understanding is just irresponsible. But how does writing code helps with that? Reading helps a lot, but writing just slows things down in my experience so far.

I'd love to see open source win, for the reasons the article talks about and others, but so far I'm not convinced this is actually happening, unfortunately.

To me, literally writing code by hand instead of letting AI do it feels like digging a foundation pit with a shovel instead of letting an excavator do it. Sure it can be done but much slower and the benefits are questionable. But curious if you have reasons to believe otherwise?