Reading the code does not mean you understand the code. One lesson that experience in software gave me: I never understood the code. You think it works a certain way, until you find out that it doesn't.
What LLMs make possible is for me to say: find out all the ways this thing works. Analyze the different ways we can run this software, build a fuzzer, build property tests, and run this software in every scenario possible. Log full traces. Log all the outputs. Now, analyze each scenario for bugs. You can't do that by hand.
If we are committed to it, if we put the resources towards it and dedicate the time to it (and we could do this just by saying: it will take half as long as it used to take!), software built by llms in healthcare, finance, automotive, defense, power plans, aviation, manufacturing can all be made MORE reliable and better with LLMs... without ever reading a single line of code. The LLMS are very good at logic, by the way.
Anyway all of this reads like someone who is not actually using LLMs to build software or hasn't tried them in a while. I felt the same way in 2025. I've written 100s of thousands of lines of difficult code. You, the person reading this, has probably interacted with software I've written. For a time you would've interacted with it every time you made a debit card transaction in the united states, for example. I understand code, and care about quality, and that's why I'm all in on LLMs for code.
> Reading the code does not mean you understand the code.
Reading the code may not be enough to understand the behaviour of your program, but believing you can understand the behaviour of a program without at least reading the high level code is truly silly.
(by high level, I mean the code living in the higher layers - of course we don't often read the code of the generated assembly, or the interpreter, or the browser, but that's because they're reliable abstractions, unlike prompts!)
> believing you can understand the behaviour of a program without at least reading the high level code is truly silly.
have you ever used a library after only reading the README and documentation, or do you always pull the source and read through it before you think you understand it?
I've used libraries before, where I call the API surface that they expose based on method names and parameter types, without reading all the source. Generally those libraries don't implement my software's entire problem domain area; they tend to implement things like "CSV parser" or "HTTP server". The important code, that I'm actively reading and writing, tends to be the code around those library calls.
This is different from building a product, which you only interact with via UI buttons/CLI/etc, without reading any code to understand how it conceptualizes that product's problem domain area.
People do that latter thing, and we call them "users", not "developers".
efficax · · focus · HN ↗
What LLMs make possible is for me to say: find out all the ways this thing works. Analyze the different ways we can run this software, build a fuzzer, build property tests, and run this software in every scenario possible. Log full traces. Log all the outputs. Now, analyze each scenario for bugs. You can't do that by hand.
If we are committed to it, if we put the resources towards it and dedicate the time to it (and we could do this just by saying: it will take half as long as it used to take!), software built by llms in healthcare, finance, automotive, defense, power plans, aviation, manufacturing can all be made MORE reliable and better with LLMs... without ever reading a single line of code. The LLMS are very good at logic, by the way.
Anyway all of this reads like someone who is not actually using LLMs to build software or hasn't tried them in a while. I felt the same way in 2025. I've written 100s of thousands of lines of difficult code. You, the person reading this, has probably interacted with software I've written. For a time you would've interacted with it every time you made a debit card transaction in the united states, for example. I understand code, and care about quality, and that's why I'm all in on LLMs for code.
jdkoeck · · focus · HN ↗
Reading the code may not be enough to understand the behaviour of your program, but believing you can understand the behaviour of a program without at least reading the high level code is truly silly.
(by high level, I mean the code living in the higher layers - of course we don't often read the code of the generated assembly, or the interpreter, or the browser, but that's because they're reliable abstractions, unlike prompts!)
rco8786 · · focus · HN ↗
have you ever used a library after only reading the README and documentation, or do you always pull the source and read through it before you think you understand it?
ubertaco · · focus · HN ↗
This is different from building a product, which you only interact with via UI buttons/CLI/etc, without reading any code to understand how it conceptualizes that product's problem domain area.
People do that latter thing, and we call them "users", not "developers".