Games

We're expected to use it at work and ive been using Claude a lot lately. Tbh LLM coding assistants have come a very long way since the early days of copilot. Frankly, ive worked with several other (more senior even) engineers that claude could code circles around. Not many, I could count them on my fingers, but its more competitive than some other folks have let on.

The other repliers are correct that these tools can easily spit out buggy code that sneaks its way into the codebase due to lack of oversight, test coverage, and general guard rails. This is pretty easy to spot with various services you likely use or have used (amazon has had several outages recently for example). In my own workplace we have seem significantly more code being merged and a correlated increase in bug density (which is multiplicative with the increase in code being merged). There are definitely problems with relying on LLMs too much.

People are still learning what these tools are good at. Right now that seems to be boiler plate generation, following very common or explicitly defined conventions, and unit test generation. That's not a lot, but its absolutely not nothing. People seem to think their program/app/service is a special snow flake with special requirements only understandable by greybeards. That is not at all the case, most programming in industry is gluing together existing tools and solutions in various arrangements, then putting a little proprietary sprinkle on top. This has been the state of software development for decades at this point.

Like most other social issues, the underlying problem is capitalism. Like the advent of all other industrial automation, the mere existence of LLMs causes capitalists to demand an increase of production from the existing work force. Of course quality control is going to be a problem.

I dislike LLMs because of their impact on the environment and that theyre being shoved into every product. I also do enjoy programming, so LLMs were something I really avoided until the office started demanding it. I'm trying to lean into it now though. I dont care for the product my company sells (the tech is fine and even interesting, just not a product or field that seems worthy of spending so much energy on), I don't like how many hours I work, and I'd rather be spending time organizing and with my family. So , ive been offloading a lot of work to get deliverables out the door to Claude, then pivoting over to organizing work while it churns. I'm lucky in that the product I work on can't hurt anyone if a bug gets deployed. I can just log on the next day and fix it, nbd. Obv that's not the case for all software, but it is the case for most of it. Frankly, I strongly encourage other workers that have jobs that LLMs can do large swaths of to do the same. Talk to coworkers, do some work for whatever org you're a member of (you are a member or an org, right?), and let Claude churn out shit in the background.