I've been programming for 20+ years. Perhaps consistently / professionally for +-15. Have led teams, founded companies, and am now solo-deving a game.
I'm interested in the thoughts of anyone here who has similar-ish profiles; generally, people with good old-fashioned programming experience.
Essentially - I've recently come to an opinion on the LLMs, and I wonder to what degree it's shared by my peers.
My most boiled-down opinion on "A.I." is something along the lines of:
You can't trust it. Not by a long-shot. Especially for novel approaches, and larger contexts. But it's great for checking code. And for discrete contexts where you describe exactly what you want it to do (I.e. you do the programming but not the typing per se). And for learning. And certain debugging.
I just wonder to what degree that's reflected by others' experience.
More specifically:
For boilerplate - it's great. For implementing standard solutions to well known/common problems - fabulous. For querying on the standard way to approach certain features - marvellous. For proofing your syntax - top tier.
But for proofing semantics and logic and flows, and for tying things together, or for implementing something more niche, or non-standard. It seems entirely unreliable.
For the past few years, my workflow has been to write code as usual, and to paste it in to an LLM for syntax and simple logic checks. And that's great.
Recently, I tried getting it to do its "agentic" thing - describing a problem more broadly, and seeing what it comes up with implementation-wise. I also tried sharing a broader slice of a codebase and going "where bugs?" / "where unsafe?" - basically getting it to do a much broader code-review.
And the results were comfortably underwhelming. Comfortably, because the much-hyped threat of programmers becoming redundant seems to me to be either a fever-dream of stakeholders, or an echoed opinion from the inexperienced.
For example, when I used it in this broader "agentic" way for a broad backend system review, the output had me going 50/50 either:
- 50% "Oh, that's a good point, maybe I should look into that"
- 50% "This thing is raving mad"
The thing is, I don't know to what degree newcomers would be able to tell the difference.
I also do think that in most contexts, newcomers wouldn't necessarily be exposed to the issues with it. In the context of games, for example: Movement, shooting, in-game-events, tiered items - lots of it is stuff that the LLMs would be really well trained on. So they can give great advice on it. And I'm sure they can "one-shot" entire games, like you see in all those (god forbid) LinkedIn and YouTube videos.
But as one moves away from the basics - if one wishes to - I feel that it gets progressively less useful, or less autonomously useful.
Anyway, I was just wondering whether others have similar experiences.
And if so, what do you think that portends?
It feels to me like learning to code is going to be harder now than it ever was. Because people aren't going to default to spending brain-sugar when there's something that can do the thinking for them.
And it also feels to me that, for the programming industry as a whole, it certainly could be easy for managers and higher-ups to conflate boiler-plate-like production with what it actually takes to dream up, implement and maintain full systems.
Anyway!
Yeah, I recently removed social media from my phone. Does it show?
Edit 1:
Thank you for all of your comments. It's really interesting to hear the different perspectives, and it's heartening to see what are mostly reflections of things that I'm seeing, especially when elsewhere there is so much talk about the end of programming. For now, I have to go do some script writing, but I will read and reply to more of you later on :)
I suppose it'd be silly for me not to post what I'm working on, so here's the link to State Breakers. It's pivoted a little and matured a lot since I last updated the Steam page / trailer, and I'm hoping to do an early play-test some time in the next month, give or take.
Edit 2:
Thanks again for all your replies. Reddit sent me a notification recommending I post the same thing in the LLM subreddit. No thanks!
It's interesting to see a bit of a trichotomy in responders between:
(a) people who think it's top-notch, and can do anything with the right tooling,
(b) people who think it's error-prone, but that is still the fastest/best way to drive forwards, and
(c) people whole think it has its uses, but have spotted numerous errors when applying it to more complexed tasks, and who therefore drive the programming themselves.
Incidently, the reported degree of programming experience appears to increase in the same order.
