Comment on AI Coding Is Massively Overhyped, Report Finds
expr@programming.dev 1 week agoActually typing out code has literally never been the bottleneck. It’s a vanishingly small amount of what we do. An experienced engineer can type out bash or Python scripts without so much as blinking. And better yet, they can do it without completely fabricating commands and library functions.
The hard part is truly understanding what it is you’re trying to do in the first place, and that fundamentally requires a level of semantic comprehension that LLMs do not in any way possess.
It’s very much like the “no code” solutions of yesteryear. They sound great on paper until you’re faced with the reality of the buggy, unmaintainable nightmare pile of spaghetti code that they vomit into your repo.
LLMs are truly a complete joke for software development tasks. I remain among the top 3-4 developers in terms of speed and output at my workplace (and all of the fastest people refuse to use LLMs as well), and I don’t create MRs chock full of bullshit that has to be ripped out (fucking sick of telling people to delete absolutely useless tests that do nothing but slow down our CI pipeline). The slowest people are those that keep banging their head against the LLM for “efficiency” when it’s anything but.
It’s the fucking stupidest trend I’ve seen in my career and I can’t wait until people finally wake up and realize it’s both incredibly inefficient and incredibly wasteful.