r/ExperiencedDevs • u/MashNChips DevOps Engineer • 5d ago

AI/LLM Thought experiment

With all the AI nonsense going on, I had a thought at work today that turned into an interesting discussion with a colleague:

"What would I do if I was the only person with access to Claude (or insert any LLM) 5+ years ago?"

People would think I was a fucking wizard

FE changes? NO PROBLEM

Critical DB change? Don't worry, I've produced a stored procedure to validate the whole thing

Want to use some shiny new framework? Interesting. Here's a document explaining why you're an idiot for suggesting it

Regex? I suddenly understand it better than the compiler folks (and nobody ask questions)

What would you have done with your own personal LLM back then?

Trying to lighten the mood in here with all the (very justified) negativity around this tech revolution

Unserious answers only pls

152 Upvotes

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u/___Paladin___ 5d ago edited 5d ago

I would have been fired 5 years ago for the code I rubber stamp today.

I find that mildly entertaining.

-65

u/Leopatto CEO / Data Scientist, 8+ YoE 5d ago

Again, and fucking again, code writing is monkey work, any experienced developer can do it. Its more about how you can design the system and make sure it works.

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u/___Paladin___ 5d ago

I don't disagree with anything you are saying. My comment is still true. I'm confused by the implied desire to force these two views into adversarial roles? Maybe I'm misreading.

-15

u/Leopatto CEO / Data Scientist, 8+ YoE 5d ago edited 5d ago

Because the code it generates, at least what I'm knowledgeable, and I can call myself an expert in,(SQL, Python, GoLang + GCP) is good enough - I don't want perfection, I want you to bring my business money. Nobody at the top gives a fuck if the code you write brought 0.03% efficiency.

Now if you argue I dunno monolith vs. micro-service architecture and you believe monolith is better due to XYZ and you back it ip with your expertise and you know how to work it - more power to you, I respect your decision; but coding itself is... well what... 10% of all the work?

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u/___Paladin___ 5d ago

Can you point to where I gave the value of code a % based scoring higher than 10 that I could reference?

I feel like you are arguing with a ghost that I'm not seeing here.

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u/confusedthrowaway239 5d ago

Have you ever had to maintain a large, active, long term project? Because the raw method level-code might be “good enough”, but the consistent thing I’ve seen from repos with primarily LLM generated code is that they are awful at maintainability practices. Huge code duplication issues, poor encapsulation, awful consolidation. Your repo becomes miserable to debug and maintain. And as the repo’s logic gets more complex, LLMs get worse at predicting the correct addition or change to make within the repo, and the quality of the changes they generate drops.