Excellent post. People always defend agentic/LLM-driven development by saying, "Well it's good enough", or "It works most of the time."
That may be tolerable for some user-facing app. But what if we start normalizing failures in the libraries, the infrastructure, and the compilers? Everything descends into a mess of unreliability, and that slows EVERYTHING and EVERYONE down.
> People always defend agentic/LLM-driven development by saying, "Well it's good enough", or "It works most of the time."
The main argument for LLM-driven development is much simpler: "It will get better".
The current state of LLM coding is about a year old. Imagine if we dismissed human coding efforts after a year. Rust, Python2 -> Python3 transition, Python type checking, Windows, C++, … nothing of that was done in a year and emerged in perfection in the first year. Everything takes ages to mature into a usable product. LLM coding is still in the "throw mud at the wall and see what sticks" stage, give it some more years and see how it will develop and what approaches actually work at. For the time being, LLMs are just the most useful development tool in the history of development tools, that's a pretty solid start in such a short time.
No one moved everything to Rust on the first year the language was released either, and you can get analogies for all of your examples.
But it does look like the majority of people have jumped into agentic coding
adamddev1 · · focus · HN ↗
That may be tolerable for some user-facing app. But what if we start normalizing failures in the libraries, the infrastructure, and the compilers? Everything descends into a mess of unreliability, and that slows EVERYTHING and EVERYONE down.
grumbel · · focus · HN ↗
The main argument for LLM-driven development is much simpler: "It will get better".
The current state of LLM coding is about a year old. Imagine if we dismissed human coding efforts after a year. Rust, Python2 -> Python3 transition, Python type checking, Windows, C++, … nothing of that was done in a year and emerged in perfection in the first year. Everything takes ages to mature into a usable product. LLM coding is still in the "throw mud at the wall and see what sticks" stage, give it some more years and see how it will develop and what approaches actually work at. For the time being, LLMs are just the most useful development tool in the history of development tools, that's a pretty solid start in such a short time.
joaogui1 · · focus · HN ↗
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
grumbel · · focus · HN ↗