--dangerously-skip-reading-code

In the industry I work in (banking), this becoming the norm would make me very uncomfortable; I can't help but see compliance risk, security risk, financial risk, reputation risk, etc. Maybe tools and conformance testing will get good enough that not reviewing the actual code becomes the norm, but... I remain skeptical. Current LLMs are very useful for spiking out trivial features or interrogating a codebase, but large projects or ones that do a lot futzy integrations really bog them down or cause them to do ridiculously wrong things. The repo I work on daily (330K LOC) appears to exceeds their ability to synthesize effectively, and I do not let them execute anything without close supervision.

Also I think there is an error in the assumption that shipping 20K lines of slop is adding value, even if it is correct and validated slop. There might be a demand for it, but there very well might not, in which case the maintenance burden will be born for nothing. If the features have to be maintained, you are just piling up technical debt. And if they do not, you're just burning tokens.

I would like to see how this pans out in a year or two in companies willing to experiment it. My gut feeling and experience tells me this wont be pretty, but maybe not !

Anyway, I hope I won’t be part of that experiment :’)

How would that even work?

Slopcoder prompts out a flurry of new “specification” .md files all day long, which are picked up by LLM “agents” that hallucinate code and push it to GitHub, where other word-autocomplete machines, equally fungible hallucinating garbage generators, “review” the code according to the “specification”?

Come on, this is starting to sound even more stupid than when people thought the economy could be based on wasting energy and trashing GPUs and called it “crypto”…

I wonder up until which point this won’t warrant a lawsuit for negligence. Imagine a medical or financial app that handles your sensitive information being developed in such manner. Maybe 2026 will be the year where B-corp like status will be created for software.

Rework is almost free

But disentangling dependencies remains as expensive as ever. Rework isn't free the second a system depends on it.