Why I remain a skeptic of LLMs for real software
Four years into the AI revolution, the author argues that LLMs have yet to deliver meaningful improvements in software quality, speed, or cost. Despite $1.5 trillion in investment, independent evidence of productivity gains is thin, and AI-generated code often misses obvious issues. The author also critiques the homogenization of intellectual labor and the industry's focus on lines of code as a metric, citing Peter Naur's work.
A technological revolution is usually marked by old empires falling and being replaced with new players and ideas. It is not clear to me that the industry has produced any new ideas in the last few years that haven’t been in the navel-gazing arena of AI boosterism.
- socalgal2
> We are 4 years into this ‘revolution’ and the industry has almost nothing to show for it. Software has not improved in quality,
Apple, Mozillia, and Firefox just released a record number of bug fixes because of AI. So this assertion that Software as not improved in quality is arguably if not provably false. There are 1000s of other examples. I have my own. Personal projects that were stopped because of dependency rot, having 100s of bugs fixed, nearly all dependencies removed, and lots of tests added just by asking. I know tons of others with similar experiences
> I do not feel like I’m falling behind by not using them
Obviously you are correct about "how you feel". But, this argument to me is more like a horse owner claming they don't feel like they're failling behind to trucks that can carry 10x, 100x, 1000x more than their horse. Sure, maybe the horse can go places the truck can't. For most uses the truck is better than the horse.
> The LLM-generated PRs I get are still rubbish.
I can't argue with that. I haven't seed the LLM-generated PRs "you" get. I can say though the LLM-generated bug reports I've seen are 1000x better than human ones. Human bug report "your software breaks, fix it!". LLM bug report "There is a bug in this specfic part of the code for these specific reasons and here's a repo I wrote to demonstrate the bug. Here's instructions on how to run the repo. There's the code to fix the bug. And, here's a test to show the bug is fixed."
Is it perfect? No, som […]
- wewewedxfgdf
>> We are 4 years into this ‘revolution’ and the industry has almost nothing to show for it.
If you actually used LLMs instead of preaching against them from the sidelines with no real experience, you'd know such statements are wrong.
This is the real problem with many of the anti LLM folks - they tell us about LLMs and also tell us they don't use them.
"That thing cannot do the stuff you say it can. And there is no way I will ever try it. But I know for sure I am right."
- andai
>productivity
I recently experienced some cognitive decline due to chronic health issues. This is unfortunate timing because I am shipping a game with online multiplayer for the first time. So "brain works properly" is kind of a basic job requirement! But you work with what you got...
Some day I have the energy to do programming "manually", but on many days, the difference between "tasks get done" and "I am just staring at the screen reading the same code over and over again" is "ask the LLM to do it."
So I have had to shift my identity from "the guy who does the thing" to "the guy who ensures the thing has been done."
That being said, I do check the diffs carefully. (I tried a more hands-off approach a few months ago, and that was a pretty bad idea.) And I've learned to make the diffs as small as possible: more digestible for me, and less room for the AI to go off the rails.
Nice bonus to small, well defined changes is that small, fast, cheap models can handle them. (Having a great time with Luna lately, even on Low reasoning effort, which I wasn't expecting at all.)
- hax0ron3
>The not-so-quiet goal of the LLM push by big tech was to homogenise intellectual labour such that it can be made fungible. When labour is fungible you can swap it out whenever you like for an alternative, decreasing the bargaining power of workers. Software development was one of the last ‘guild fields’ and now we are seeing its industrialisation occur.
I think that the industrialization of software development already happened decades ago. The common professional software development methodologies, both waterfall and sprint-based, ARE the industrialization of software development. Isn't modern "agile", sprint-based software development methodology directly influenced by Japanese manufacturing methods? I don't know when software development actually was a guild field, and my personal experience doesn't reach back this far, but based on what I've read at least, it seems to me that even back in the 1990s it was already not a guild field.
- Grombobulous
The last bullet point is the most important. The industry is most hyped about AI so that they can pay software developers $70k instead of paying them $200k.
I don’t really agree that AI can’t make development faster, though. What the author describes as the negative AI outcome is blind vibecoding. There are many other ways to use it, and even the basic “enhanced autocomplete” is a net benefit, especially since that functionality is dirt cheap or free.
- classictraffic
To the author’s point about there not being enough evidence to support pro-AI claims — Additionally, there are studies and articles coming out showing those people are wrong and AI only makes people barely more efficient. Not the 10x tech CEOs are claiming while slashing thousands of jobs
https://getdx.com/blog/ai-productivity-gains-are-10-percent-...
- spl757
All AI hallucinates, and therefore is unpredictable and unreliable. 1.5 trillion dollars to prove the obvious. It has no place in production use. IMHO at least. They want so badly to get rid of all of us, and replace us with something that doesn't complain, doesn't have kids, or outside lives or want ick, vacations. Most of you are paycheck to paycheck, statistically speaking, so you have a vested interest in how this all turns out.
edit: I get it, it's not a popular opinion.
But am I wrong?
If the problem of hallucination in AI has been solved, maybe I missed it?
- mrdomino-
> The not-so-quiet goal of the LLM push by big tech was to homogenise intellectual labour such that it can be made fungible. When labour is fungible you can swap it out whenever you like for an alternative, decreasing the bargaining power of workers. Software development was one of the last ‘guild fields’ and now we are seeing its industrialisation occur.
This is really well said. I had not put my finger on it before. Maybe this is a next move in the saga to avoid labor unions in engineering.