I don't think it's as much as opening up what we _could_ do, it's opening up time so that more can be done.
Slop is too generic of a complaint. Do LLMs write code exactly how I would? No. Is my way right? Probably not. But what LLMs are great at are pre-emptively thinking about edge cases that I forget when writing the code. I'm surprised as how many fewer weird bugs come back to me now after a release. Should I have thought of them? Yes probably, but I don't and they do. So in practice, I do think LLMs write better code than me (if you look at results not the actual code itself).
But more importantly is that it allows me to take on projects that I never would have. Some of them are personal projects, some of them are work projects. I often didn't even consider a project because the time it would take _me_ to do it would not be worth the value. But now that _I_ don't have to do it, I can do more things. At the end of the workday last week, I kicked off a project that I've wanted to do for the last 5 years but could never justify writing it. The LLM crunched for 36 hours, I checked in on it this morning and it's ready for me to deploy next week when I get in the office. Something that would have taken me probably 9 months of focused effort. It would never have been worth 9 months of engineering time, but it sure is worth the 36 hours of background work while I was doing something else productive.
I guess it's not a quantum leap in the frontier of what _can_ be done, but it is a leap in what _will_ be done because the cost/benefit parameters change.
>So in practice, I do think LLMs write better code than me (if you look at results not the actual code itself).
"correct" code is not "good" code. We see this quite a bit with the analogue of AI-generated text. Having all your grammar and spelling correct does not make for a more compelling read.
like, a correct, tested class doesn't necessarily stand up to integrating into a million line legacy code. Executives don't understand this, but this is the value being shedded as they try their 4th or 5th wave of attempts to take the programmer out of programming.
Slop is too generic of a complaint. Do LLMs write code exactly how I would? No. Is my way right? Probably not. But what LLMs are great at are pre-emptively thinking about edge cases that I forget when writing the code. I'm surprised as how many fewer weird bugs come back to me now after a release. Should I have thought of them? Yes probably, but I don't and they do. So in practice, I do think LLMs write better code than me (if you look at results not the actual code itself).
But more importantly is that it allows me to take on projects that I never would have. Some of them are personal projects, some of them are work projects. I often didn't even consider a project because the time it would take _me_ to do it would not be worth the value. But now that _I_ don't have to do it, I can do more things. At the end of the workday last week, I kicked off a project that I've wanted to do for the last 5 years but could never justify writing it. The LLM crunched for 36 hours, I checked in on it this morning and it's ready for me to deploy next week when I get in the office. Something that would have taken me probably 9 months of focused effort. It would never have been worth 9 months of engineering time, but it sure is worth the 36 hours of background work while I was doing something else productive.
I guess it's not a quantum leap in the frontier of what _can_ be done, but it is a leap in what _will_ be done because the cost/benefit parameters change.