By “good” I mean code that is written professionally and concisely (and obviously works as intended). Apart from personal interest and understanding what the machine spits out, is there any legit reason anyone should learn advanced coding techniques? Specifically in an engineering perspective?

If not, learning how to write code seems a tad trivial now.

  • Septimaeus
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    4 months ago

    Theoretically, I would say yes it’s possible, insofar as we could break down most subtasks of the development process into training parameters. But we are a long way from that currently.

    ETA: I suspect LLM’s best use-case in this hypothetical would not be in architecting or implementation, but rather limited to tasks with human interfaces (requirements gathering, project planning and logistics, test scaffolding, feedback collection/distribution, etc).

    If the unironic goal is to develop things without any engineering oversight (mistake) then there’s no point to using programming languages at all. The machine might as well just output assembly or bin code.

    What’s more likely in the short term are software LLMs generating partial solutions that human engineers then are asked to “finish” (fix) and maintain. The effort and hours required to do so will, at a guess, balloon terribly and will often be at best proportional to the resources saved by the use of the automatic spaghetti generator.

    I eagerly await these post mortems.