Posted by softwaredoug 2 days ago
In my personal life, I cannot justify more than a $20 sub per month. I only use the Web Chat anyway. Shelling out $100-$200 a month for a sub in which I would get little to no ROI is a poor choice. Besides, I've never hit the limit on my $20 a month plan either.
The day I am forced to prompt LLMs all day, every day is the day I am cashing out of programming as a career. Though to be clear, I have no opposition towards anyone that uses LLMs, and think they are fantastic tools when used appropriately. (I love them as a StackOverflow replacement, and have learned a lot from going back and forth with LLMs).
Can I use agents to code a SWE project? yes, with nuances.
Can I write code for a SWE project? yes, with nuances.
Its more options now, I'll write code about projects I deeply care and will use llm at work where its shared slop and forced usage.
Why are you building a software factory though, and why weren't you immediately adding CI to every project?
> It’s our job to build the software factory - not just the software. Software engineers maintain the assembly line allowing anyone to prompt for a change and ship immediately.
Again, why? Where are you working where this is considered a good idea? This would mean that the software engineers are not just being completely kicked out of all business decisions, but asked to build a moat that ensures they stay on the other side of it.
Any business that intentionally devalues the insights gained through implementation will eventually starve itself to death by making too many passive thoughtless moves. No insight will ever be gained just spot checking AI. Is their intention really just to make tiny amounts of profit while riding the thing into the ground? Crabs in a bucket, man.
The selling point is that you know have a quality Vs time tradeoff that is a lot better than you used to have.
I can spend 10 seconds typing out a prompt that will generate ok code.
Before a couple of years ago, it might have taken me an hour to type out and debug that code.
> Before a couple of years ago, it might have taken me an hour to type out and debug that code.
Are you not running and testing your code?
> Are you not running and testing your code?
Why would you think that?
Because you’re claiming to not debug, and that you’ve gone from 1 hour to 10 seconds. I can only go off of what you tell me here.
Then there's the mass. I don't need that anymore. The mountains of boilerplate, etc.
I write little islands which need high judgement that are then connected by the obvious goo.
Generating boilerplate is strictly inferior than something already written and tested by the authors of the tools. You will eventually have to make slight adjustments to it, and those decisions can be just as impactful as your "high judgment" code. Those decisions are what actually enable your high judgment code to stay clean and straightforward.
Poor decisions in code architecture are some of the biggest blunders of all. Once you have begun to fill in the blanks on some boilerplate code, it ceases to remain boilerplate code. If you let AI make those adjustments, you will eventually blunder the codebase in precisely this way. You'll first recognize it when your high judgment code seems too verbose. You'll then soon realize some things are impossible without adjusting the boilerplate you started off with. Then the AI will fail to grasp what you want and you'll have to manually untangle a lot of the slop that you let grow out of control. Good luck with that.