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Comment by simonw

I'm not arguing for using LLMs as an abstraction.

I'm saying that a key component of the dependency calculation has changed.

It used to be that one of the most influential facts affecting your decision to add a new library was the cost of writing the subset of code that you needed yourself. If writing that code and the accompanying tests represented more than an hour of work, a library was usually a better investment.

If the code and tests take a few minutes those calculations can look very different.

Making these decisions effectively and responsibly is one of the key characteristics of a senior engineer, which is why it's so interesting that all of those years of intuition are being disrupted.

The code we are producing remains the same. The difference is that a senior developer may have written that function + tests in several hours, at a cost of thousands of dollars. Now that same senior developer can produce exactly the same code at a time cost of less than $100.

parent simonw 10 months ago

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