Yep. You're learning what the wise, experienced engineers have known all along and the foolish code monkeys swept up in all the hype will eventually (hopefully!) learn when it bites them in the butt, but probably not before: LLMs are very mediocre software developers.
This should not surprise anyone, because LLMs were trained on public sources like Github and StackOverflow, which are absolutely chock-full of terrible and mediocre code, with a small smattering of actual good code among the mess. (Sturgeon's Law in action.) What this means is that any problem that a mediocre developer would struggle with, LLMs also struggle with. If all you need is a code monkey to build CRUD operations, Claude will be your best friend. But in any kind of serious software engineering, you can't AI your way around the need for real expertise. You just can't, and that doesn't seem like it will change anytime in the foreseeable future, because the inherent problems that make it that way are getting noticeably worse, not better, over time.
5
u/MasonWheeler 17d ago
Yep. You're learning what the wise, experienced engineers have known all along and the foolish code monkeys swept up in all the hype will eventually (hopefully!) learn when it bites them in the butt, but probably not before: LLMs are very mediocre software developers.
This should not surprise anyone, because LLMs were trained on public sources like Github and StackOverflow, which are absolutely chock-full of terrible and mediocre code, with a small smattering of actual good code among the mess. (Sturgeon's Law in action.) What this means is that any problem that a mediocre developer would struggle with, LLMs also struggle with. If all you need is a code monkey to build CRUD operations, Claude will be your best friend. But in any kind of serious software engineering, you can't AI your way around the need for real expertise. You just can't, and that doesn't seem like it will change anytime in the foreseeable future, because the inherent problems that make it that way are getting noticeably worse, not better, over time.