- -dangerously-skip-reading-code – olano.dev

Summary

-​-dangerously-skip-reading-code I concluded my previous post saying that it was irresponsible to assume that we won’t need to worry about reading and debugging our code anymore—to assume that whatever problem that pops up the LLMs will be able to fix for us. This felt irresponsible because, up until now, it has been the programmer’s job to understand and maintain the source code, as a proxy to understanding and maintaining the software system. We are held accountable for the LLMs’ output. But what if this wasn’t the case anymore? What if we dutifully communicate the risks and trade-offs to our organizational leadership and they still want to take those risks? This isn’t unheard of: companies, and especially tech startups, regularly make short-term compromises to improve productivity, beat the competition to market, lure investors, etc. If there’s an organizational mandate to leverage LLMs to minimize the time spent coding, then that’s a new constraint we can work with. We can figure out what good engineering looks like in that context. We can stop reading LLM-generated code just like we don’t read assembly, or bytecode, or transpiled JavaScript; our high-level language source would now be another form of machine code. This finally clicked for me after reading Thoughtworks’ retreat report. The LLMs produce non-deterministic output and generate code much faster than we can read it, so we can’t seriously expect to effectively review, understand, and approve every diff anymore. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we stop being rigorous, it could mean we should move rigor elsewhere. It’s fundamental to understand, though, that this is not an individual’s or team’s call: it has to be an organizational decision, and not just because of risk management and accountability, but because of Amdahl’s law. If we only maximize code generation speed without rearranging the organizational structures and processes in which our work is embedded, there won’t be any tangible productivity...