The problem imo is the slow deterioration of institutional knowledge that offloading the mental task of wisdom gathering to AI is causing.
One interesting comparison is to the history of manufacturing. West/America decided one day that manufacturing would be cheaper to outsource and better (short term) profit was to be made by outsourcing it all to China. The institutional expertise started to deteriorate, to the point that America simply didn't even have the capacity, or expertise anymore to produce stuff (such as grill brush [1])
I feel like you could take all the handwavy comment that are made today to dismiss this caution, and find equal dismissal back then when companies were actively outsourcing the manufacturing.
"I'm coding 10x faster"
"look at the output velocity per employee"
"we are producing much more (in China)"
"look at profit / number of (manufacturing) employers"
Seems ok if you're American / Chinese but I'm struggling to understand how the rest can be OK with allowing institutional knowledge to deteriorate while having an active dependency to the former two. We already see this with the tech dependency towards USA and manufacturing competition from China.
It is not unsurprising to find dev lacking knowledge in domain stuff that would be actually required if they were doing the development themselves, rather than outsource it to an LLM.
So the client who writes the ticket understand the domain, the LLM that implement it understand it too.
There is more to development than domain knowledge. There are decades of wisdom about development best practices on how to keep a large codebase maintainable, performant, testable, etc. that LLMs frequently don't follow. And now humans aren't practicing those skills either or passing down lessons learned to the next generation of programmers.
Maybe it will be no big deal, and nobody will read code anymore, but it is understandable why somebody might be concerned about it.
NalNezumi · · focus · HN ↗
One interesting comparison is to the history of manufacturing. West/America decided one day that manufacturing would be cheaper to outsource and better (short term) profit was to be made by outsourcing it all to China. The institutional expertise started to deteriorate, to the point that America simply didn't even have the capacity, or expertise anymore to produce stuff (such as grill brush [1])
I feel like you could take all the handwavy comment that are made today to dismiss this caution, and find equal dismissal back then when companies were actively outsourcing the manufacturing.
"I'm coding 10x faster" "look at the output velocity per employee"
"we are producing much more (in China)" "look at profit / number of (manufacturing) employers"
Seems ok if you're American / Chinese but I'm struggling to understand how the rest can be OK with allowing institutional knowledge to deteriorate while having an active dependency to the former two. We already see this with the tech dependency towards USA and manufacturing competition from China.
[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY
lolakutty · · focus · HN ↗
So the client who writes the ticket understand the domain, the LLM that implement it understand it too.
The dev is the only one that is clueless.
camdenreslink · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe it will be no big deal, and nobody will read code anymore, but it is understandable why somebody might be concerned about it.
lolakutty · · focus · HN ↗
Without domain knowledge, the dev will miss critical simplifications. That is one way the code base accrue complexity.
AnimalMuppet · · focus · HN ↗
lolakutty · · focus · HN ↗