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It’s a metaphor. With enough oversight, a qualified engineer can get good results out of an underperforming (or extremely junior) engineer. With a junior engine

by dpark 10mo ago

It’s a metaphor. With enough oversight, a qualified engineer can get good results out of an underperforming (or extremely junior) engineer. With a junior engineer, you give the oversight to help them grow. With an underperforming engineer you hope they grow quickly or you eventually terminate their employment because it’s a poor time trade off. The trade off with an LLM is different. It’s not actually a junior or underperforming engineer. It’s far faster at churning out code than even the best engineers. It can read code far faster. It writes tests more consistently than most engineers (in my experience). It is surprisingly good at catching edge cases. With a junior engineer, you drag down your own performance to improve theirs and you’re often trading off short term benefits vs long term. With an LLM, your net performance goes up because it’s augmenting you with its own strengths. As an engineer, it will never reach senior level (though future models might). But as a tool, it can enable you to do more.

12_throw_away 10mo ago
> It’s far faster at churning out code than even the best engineers. I'm not sure I can think of a more damning indictment than this tbh
- dpark 10mo ago
  Can you explain why that’s damning?
  - nmehner 10mo ago
    I guess everyone dealing with legacy software sees code as a cost factor. Being able to delete code is harder, but often more important than writing code. Owning code requires you to maintain it. Finding out what parts of the code actual implement features and what parts are not needed anymore (or were never needed in the first place) is really hard. Since most of the time the requirements have never been documented and the authors have left or cannot remember. But not understanding what the code does removed all possibility to improve or modify it. This is how software dies. Churning out code fast is a huge future liability. Management wants solutions fast and doesn't understand these long term costs. It is the same with all code generators: Short term gains, but long term maintainability issues.
    - dpark 10mo ago
      Do you not write code? Is your code base frozen, or do you write code for new features and bug fixes? The fact that AI can churn out code 1000x faster does not mean you should have it churn out 1000x more code. You might have a list of 20 critical features and it have time to implement 10. AI could let you get all 20 but shouldn’t mean you check in code for 1000 features you don’t even need.
      - nmehner 10mo ago
        I write code. On a good day perhaps 800-1000 "hand written" lines. I have never actually thought about how much typing time this actually is. Perhaps an hour? In that case 7/8th of my day are filled with other stuff. Like analysis, planning, gathering requirements, talking to people. So even if an AI removed almost all the time I spend typing away: This is only a 10% improvement in speed. Even if you ignore that I still have to review the code, understand everything and correct possible problems. A bigger speedup is only possible if you decide not to understand everything the AI does and just trust it to do the right thing.
        dpark 10mo ago
        Maybe you code so fast that the thought-to-code transition is not a bottleneck for you. In which case, awesome for you. I suspect this makes you a significant outlier since respected and productive engineers like Antirez seem to find benefits.
    - ubercow13 10mo ago
      Sure if you just leave all the code there. But if it's churning out iterations, incrementally improving stuff, it seems ok? That's pretty much what we do as humans, at least IME.
  - 12_throw_away 10mo ago
    Sure: [1] https://saintgimp.org/2009/03/11/source-code-is-a-liability-not-an-asset/ https://saintgimp.org/2009/03/11/source-code-is-a-liability-... [2] https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/ https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/
    - dpark 10mo ago
      I feel like this is a forest for the trees kind of thing. It is implied that the code being created is for “capabilities”. If your AI is churning out needless code, then sure, that’s a bad thing. Why would you be asking the AI for code you don’t need, though? You should be asking it for critical features, bug fixes, the things you would be coding up regardless. You can use a hammer to break your own toes or you can use it to put a roof on your house. Using a tool poorly reflects on the craftsman, not the tool.
fzeroracer 10mo ago
> It writes tests more consistently than most engineers (in my experience) I'm going to nit on this specifically. I firmly believe anyone that genuinely believes this either never writes tests that actually matter, or doesn't review the tests that an LLM throws out there. I've seen so many cases of people saying 'look at all these valid tests our LLM of choice wrote' only for half of them to do nothing and half of them misleading as to what it actually tests.
- dpark 10mo ago
  It’s like anything else, you’ve got to check the results and potentially push it to fix stuff. I recently had AI code up a feature that was essentially text manipulation. There were existing tests to show it how to write effective tests and it did a great job of covering the new functionality. My feedback to the AI was mostly around some inaccurate comments it made in the code but the coverage was solid. Would have actually been faster for me to fix but I’m experimenting with how much I can make the AI do. On the other hand I had AI code up another feature in a different code base and it produced a bunch of tests with little actual validation. It basically invoked the new functionality with a good spectrum of arguments but then just validated that the code didn’t throw. And in one case it tested something that diverged slightly from how the code would actually be invoked. In that case I told it how to validate what the functionality was actually doing and how to make the one test more representative. In the end it was good coverage with a small amount of work. For people who don’t usually test or care bunch about testing, yeah, they probably let the AI create garbage tests.
  - ubercow13 10mo ago
    >feature that was essentially text manipulation That seems like the kind of feature where the LLM would already have the domain knowledge needed to write reasonable tests, though. Similar to how it can vibe code a surprisingly complicated website or video game without much help, but probably not create a single component of a complex distributed system that will fit into an existing architecture, with exactly the correct behaviour based on some obscure domain knowledge that pretty much exists only in your company.

by dpark 10mo ago

12_throw_away 10mo ago

> It’s far faster at churning out code than even the best engineers. I'm not sure I can think of a more damning indictment than this tbh

dpark 10mo ago
Can you explain why that’s damning?
- nmehner 10mo ago
  I guess everyone dealing with legacy software sees code as a cost factor. Being able to delete code is harder, but often more important than writing code. Owning code requires you to maintain it. Finding out what parts of the code actual implement features and what parts are not needed anymore (or were never needed in the first place) is really hard. Since most of the time the requirements have never been documented and the authors have left or cannot remember. But not understanding what the code does removed all possibility to improve or modify it. This is how software dies. Churning out code fast is a huge future liability. Management wants solutions fast and doesn't understand these long term costs. It is the same with all code generators: Short term gains, but long term maintainability issues.
  - dpark 10mo ago
    Do you not write code? Is your code base frozen, or do you write code for new features and bug fixes? The fact that AI can churn out code 1000x faster does not mean you should have it churn out 1000x more code. You might have a list of 20 critical features and it have time to implement 10. AI could let you get all 20 but shouldn’t mean you check in code for 1000 features you don’t even need.
    - nmehner 10mo ago
      I write code. On a good day perhaps 800-1000 "hand written" lines. I have never actually thought about how much typing time this actually is. Perhaps an hour? In that case 7/8th of my day are filled with other stuff. Like analysis, planning, gathering requirements, talking to people. So even if an AI removed almost all the time I spend typing away: This is only a 10% improvement in speed. Even if you ignore that I still have to review the code, understand everything and correct possible problems. A bigger speedup is only possible if you decide not to understand everything the AI does and just trust it to do the right thing.
      - dpark 10mo ago
        Maybe you code so fast that the thought-to-code transition is not a bottleneck for you. In which case, awesome for you. I suspect this makes you a significant outlier since respected and productive engineers like Antirez seem to find benefits.
  - ubercow13 10mo ago
    Sure if you just leave all the code there. But if it's churning out iterations, incrementally improving stuff, it seems ok? That's pretty much what we do as humans, at least IME.
- 12_throw_away 10mo ago
  Sure: [1] https://saintgimp.org/2009/03/11/source-code-is-a-liability-not-an-asset/ https://saintgimp.org/2009/03/11/source-code-is-a-liability-... [2] https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/ https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/
  - dpark 10mo ago
    I feel like this is a forest for the trees kind of thing. It is implied that the code being created is for “capabilities”. If your AI is churning out needless code, then sure, that’s a bad thing. Why would you be asking the AI for code you don’t need, though? You should be asking it for critical features, bug fixes, the things you would be coding up regardless. You can use a hammer to break your own toes or you can use it to put a roof on your house. Using a tool poorly reflects on the craftsman, not the tool.

fzeroracer 10mo ago

> It writes tests more consistently than most engineers (in my experience) I'm going to nit on this specifically. I firmly believe anyone that genuinely believes this either never writes tests that actually matter, or doesn't review the tests that an LLM throws out there. I've seen so many cases of people saying 'look at all these valid tests our LLM of choice wrote' only for half of them to do nothing and half of them misleading as to what it actually tests.

dpark 10mo ago
It’s like anything else, you’ve got to check the results and potentially push it to fix stuff. I recently had AI code up a feature that was essentially text manipulation. There were existing tests to show it how to write effective tests and it did a great job of covering the new functionality. My feedback to the AI was mostly around some inaccurate comments it made in the code but the coverage was solid. Would have actually been faster for me to fix but I’m experimenting with how much I can make the AI do. On the other hand I had AI code up another feature in a different code base and it produced a bunch of tests with little actual validation. It basically invoked the new functionality with a good spectrum of arguments but then just validated that the code didn’t throw. And in one case it tested something that diverged slightly from how the code would actually be invoked. In that case I told it how to validate what the functionality was actually doing and how to make the one test more representative. In the end it was good coverage with a small amount of work. For people who don’t usually test or care bunch about testing, yeah, they probably let the AI create garbage tests.
- ubercow13 10mo ago
  >feature that was essentially text manipulation That seems like the kind of feature where the LLM would already have the domain knowledge needed to write reasonable tests, though. Similar to how it can vibe code a surprisingly complicated website or video game without much help, but probably not create a single component of a complex distributed system that will fit into an existing architecture, with exactly the correct behaviour based on some obscure domain knowledge that pretty much exists only in your company.