Tech Execs Are Mandating LLM Adoption. That’s Bad Strategy. But I Get Where They’re Coming From. 8 minutes read.
"People complain about LLM-generated code being "probabilistic". No it isn’t. It’s code. It’s not Yacc output. It’s knowable. The LLM might be stochastic. But the LLM doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you can make sense of the result, and whether your guardrails hold. Reading other people’s code is part of the job. If you can’t metabolize the boring, repetitive code an LLM generates: skills issue! How are you handling the chaos human developers turn out on a deadline? [...] Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. If anything we build endures, it won’t be because the codebase was beautiful." -- Being able to make sense of the result (by another human or LLM-generated code) and building solid guardrails (first, define it to your team) are key for adopting new technologies. In a few years (or perhaps a few months), it will be difficult to determine whether the code was generated by a great engineer, human or machine. It's time to adopt this mindset and leverage it to enhance our relationships with software that produces value.
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