This article is lumps design and implementation together. In my experience, LLMs are really quite bad at designing anything interesting. They are sort of tolerable at implementation — they’re remarkably persistent (compared to humans, anyway), they will tirelessly use whatever framework, good or bad, you throw at them, and they will produce code that is quite painful to look at. And they’ll say that they’re architecting things and hope you’re impressed.
In my experience, LLMs are bad at designing even repetitive boring things.
I was wondering if our goal is to leverage them to think about interfaces a bit, like a slightly accelerated modeling phase and then let them loose on the implementation (and maybe later let them loose on local optimization tricks)
>LLMs are really quite bad at designing anything interesting
Let’s be honest, how many devs are actually creating something interesting/unique at their work?
Most of the time, our job is just picking the right combination of well-known patterns to make the best possible trade-offs while fulfilling the requirements.
> Most of the time, our job is just picking the right combination of well-known patterns to make the best possible trade-offs while fulfilling the requirements.
Right. I don't trust LLM's to pick the right pattern. It will pick _a_ pattern and it will mostly sorta fulfill the requirements.
Today I asked an LLM (Codex whatever-the-default-is) to implement something straightforward, and it cheerfully implemented it twice, right next to each other, in the same file, and then wrote the actual code that used it and open-coded a stupendously crappy implementation of the same thing right there. The amazing thing is that the whole mess kind of worked.
Just pick patterns yourself and let LLM fill them in with colours :)
Unless you work for a consulting firm, you should be working on something new/unique.
It’s a winner-takes-all market. There are no buyers for off brand Salesforce or Uber.
That feels a bit rigid.
Many people are in position where they can’t afford risking their financial future by going all-in on startup. They just want to do honest work in exchange on paycheck and enjoy time with family after 5pm and on weekends.
There are not? So Lyft and bolt do not exists?
Same with Salesforce, there are a few hundred alternatives
I was going to say - with agents the only part I actually have to do is design. Well, and testing. But they don’t really do design work so much as architecture selection if you provide a design.