2026-03-10 00:25:02.90283+01 by Dan Lyke 2 comments
Hearing comparisons of using LLMs for coding to the same sort of revolution that word processors brought to skilled typists.
And wow does that say a lot about what those people think software is.
[ related topics: Software Engineering ]
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#Comment Re: made: 2026-03-10 22:42:06.445151+01 by: Mars Saxman [edit history]
Something really has changed in the last couple of months, though, and it reminds me of the era when we all (mostly) stopped writing assembly code, because high-level language compilers had become good enough that it was no longer worth the bother of hand-optimizing.
Nothing is perfect, but codex writes better code than a number of professional human programmers I've worked with. It's probably better than I was for the first half of my career. It's not better than me now, but it's good enough, and it's faster, and never gets bored or tired. In the span of three months I've gone from "LLMs are basically toys" to "writing this code by hand would be a poor use of time". It's a strange moment to be in.
#Comment Re: made: 2026-03-11 19:55:18.690737+01 by: Dan Lyke
Yeah, I'm finding myself treating a lot of "make this CSS more modern" and "whip up this HTML+JS demo" as Gemini things, and I both wonder about the fact that when I do that I'm not learning anything, and that I'm undoubtedly introducing underlying yuck that I'm not bothering to check for (because I'm not learning anything, and I'm not actually checking the code).
It's disturbing, because writing code is so little of the job of a programmer, and yet...
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