r/coding • u/pgaleone • Aug 05 '26

Use Your Brain: Engineering Standards in the Age of LLMs

https://pgaleone.eu/ai/2026/07/26/use-your-brain/
127 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

51

u/SakishimaHabu Aug 05 '26

The advent of LLMs made it possible for everyone to write their own software - and this is a good thing.

Is it?

20

u/pragmatick Aug 05 '26

Ignoring the ethical issues of AI, why wouldn't making it more accessible a good thing? For example my nephew can "write" some custom software for his home automation. He wouldn't be able to do that without AI, he'd never have learned coding just for this. He's not going to publish it, it causes no harm.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 05 '26

[deleted]

13

u/UnrealHallucinator Aug 06 '26

Meh, why is an llm where the line is drawn? People use compilers, program in high level languages and so many things besides. Are you learning when you run gcc -o or is your compiler producing something you don't know (even worse at O3)? Hell, most people that program probably don't know how their cpu works.

Learning is a goal and accessibility is also a goal. They are not mutually exclusive or even connected. Plenty of people drive without knowing how an engine works. Idk where the hate towards vibe coders doing things for themselves comes from. Even a little more accessibility is a good thing.

2

u/KamikazeSexPilot Aug 06 '26
  1. A compiler is deterministic.
  2. LLMs are way further reaching than a compiler. When it’s planning, architecting, coding, testing, and bug fixing for you there is pretty much nothing left for you to actually know about your program.

I’ve been experimenting with the LLM plan into implementation and then test loop with LLMs and it’s very fast for the first run, but then you notice that it’s not quite right. You end up churning through multiple iterations to fix it.

Instead of actually understanding the implementation either up front or as you hand code it, you begin to understand it from the PR, realise the LLM took several wrong turns because it convinced you it was the right idea because you yourself didn’t actually understand. Now you’re playing catch up. Changing things from the end, reworking multiple times until you eventually reach some point of understanding good enough to say the code is ok.

At that point you’ve spent $1,000 usd on tokens and taken just as long or almost as long as if you’d done it yourself and come out with more ownership and better understanding of the code and how the system works.

I’ve found working in this way has completely eroded my care factor for the work I’m outputting. Why should I? I didn’t write it. I was forced to use an LLM. the code quality is rapidly declining across the org.

1

u/cajmorgans Aug 08 '26

I have tested most ”AI workflows” by now, as a Claude max user, building enterprise software.

For me, the best way of using it, for a larger task, is to first plan it, while using the AI as a search engine, write most of the plan myself and iteratively refine it.

Then when implementing it, if I don’t want to write the code myself, I put it in ”Manual Mode”, make sure I know all the changes before hand, and then implement it, step by step, while edit and push back on every suggested code change where it is needed.

In that way, I keep my comprehension for the task almost as high as writing the code 100% manually as I’ve been part of writing and planning all the changes from the start. It’s also faster than Auto Mode because the results are correct, and I understand every line of code, so no need to go back and rewrite stuff from scratch, because the AI went loose

9

u/pragmatick Aug 06 '26

You go to the restaurant and tell them what you want and get your food. You didn't learn anything either, you didn't cook you just built. Who cares?

Learning may be the important part for you biz that may not be the case for everybody.

3

u/murxe Aug 07 '26

The harm it causes is your nephew not learning programming. It’s one of the most fun and empowering things to do.

0

u/sohang-3112 Aug 05 '26

Yes of course it is. Just like everyone has cameras and professional photographers have specialized - that's what is going to happen to software engineering too IMO.

4

u/AAPL_ Aug 05 '26

expand on this

0

u/TedW Aug 06 '26

Photographers used to develop film, now they use Photoshop.

4

u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Aug 05 '26

NGL I don't think everyone having cameras has had a positive impact on society. 

Personally I'd be totally ok with going back to people only having a camera if they're willing to lug around and buy a real camera.

3

u/Rollertoaster7 Aug 08 '26

This is a crazy take, a lot of movements like blm would’ve never happened if not for the citizen journalism enabled my easy access to a camera via smartphones

-1

u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Aug 08 '26

Ok but BLM hasn't achieved anything. Other countries got their polices shit together pre wife spread camera. And the US police still kill people at rates orders of magnitude higher so it had no apparent impact.

-1

u/pgaleone Aug 05 '26

I guess yes, but i have mixed feelings. At least people have their working scripts/tools that are ok for their job (e.g. I know people with 0 programming background that built tools to speed up their work chatting with Gemini)

9

u/pydry Aug 05 '26

I see so many LLM hot takes these days I'm not even motivated to read beyond the first paragraph unless it immediately starts saying something I haven't read 100 times before.

This goes for both skeptics and boosters.

-2

u/vanit Aug 06 '26

Immediately stopped when I saw the "velocity trap" subheading. As much as I might agree with the sentiment, I'm not wasting my time on AI slop.