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Comment by bengold14

Thanks my friend - I'm not an AI evangelist but I think it's pretty clear that AI codes very well at this point. So well that I'd hazard a guess that most software engineers don't write code anymore. Sure, maybe a professional could do better if they spent way more time on it, but it has always been a tradeoff we programmers have had to make. Getting things done + technical debt or writing the perfect code and over optimizing. And LLMs write working code, so the rest is just semantics on that scale.

Code being the wrong abstraction is similar to assembly being the wrong abstraction if you're trying to write a web browser game. Sure it's possible to do it and yes, you may end up with more optimized code, but it's not necessary and much slower to do that. Just use Javascript.

And now, people are building larger applications & functions quicker, and it no longer makes sense time-wise to look at Javascript for-loops when understanding the work. And that's because those for-loops are generally correct, if maybe a bit under optimized. Instead, engineers need a new layer of abstraction, to understand what the code is doing without having to read each line.

parent bengold14 1 month ago

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