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Everyone talking about how LLMs let

2025-07-07 19:00:02.621979+02 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

Everyone talking about how LLMs let them whip up apps super quickly, but that nobody understands and that are filled with security holes: We already had that. It was called Perl.

[ related topics: Perl Open Source hubris ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: Everyone talking about how LLMs let made: 2025-07-07 21:56:17.213146+02 by: brainopener

:) I do keep thinking of LLM generated apps as "write only code."

#Comment Re: Everyone talking about how LLMs let made: 2025-07-07 17:25:14.783261+02 by: spc476

Back in the 80s, anyone writing an application for a home computer used assembly as it was the only viable option. During the 90s, compilers got better, and PCs got beefier such that using a higher level language was becoming viable, but people still had to check the compiler output to make sure it wasn't pure garbage. Now, almost no one programs in assembly, and it's rare for anyone to check the compiler output as much.

I'm afraid the LLMs are in the late 80s in this scenario.

#Comment Re: Everyone talking about how LLMs let made: 2025-07-07 17:25:14.783261+02 by: Dan Lyke

Re PCs getting beefier: I'm realizing that one of the reasons CGI for web apps fell by the wayside is that startup time for interpreted languages was fairly long (and Perl is pretty quick at startup, which helped). And so we built all of this scaffolding to keep the code hot, and now with Rust and Go we're wrapping back around to having the code compile and suddenly the fact that you can reset our process from scratch with every request looks like a really good idea again.

But, yeah, I found a number of Visual C code generation bugs back in the day, and learned code idioms that the various compilers I used translated effectively. And as languages have improved I've been able to do more with fewer lines of code.

But the idea of "we're gonna take your language and create approximate output".... well.... even if it did work well, it seems like a bad idea.

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