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The real problem with LLM coding, in my opinion, is something much more fundamental than whether it can code correctly or not. One of the biggest problems coding faces right now is code bloat. In my 15 years writing code, I write so much less code now than when I started, and spend so much more time bolting together existing libraries, dealing with CI/CD bullshit, and all the other hair that software projects has started to grow.
The amount of code is exploding. Nowadays, every website uses ReactJS. Every single tiny website loads god knows how many libraries. Just the other day, I forked and built an open source project that had a simple web front end (a list view, some forms -- basic shit), and after building it, npm informed me that it had over a dozen critical vulnerabilities, and dozens more of high severity. I think the total was something like 70?
All code now has to be written at least once. With ChatGPT, it doesn't even need to be written once! We can generate arbitrary amounts of code all the time whenever we want! We're going to have so much fucking code, and we have absolutely no idea how to deal with that.
This is so true. I feel like my main job as a senior software engineer is to keep the bloat low and delete unused code. Its very easy to write code - maintaining it and focusing on the important bits is hard.
This will be one of the biggest and most challenging problems Computer Science will have to solve in the coming years and decades.
It's easy and fun to write new code, and it wins management's respect. The harder work of maintaining and improving large code bases and data goes mostly unappreciated.