There are still significant limitations, no amount of prompting will get current models to approach abstraction and architecture the way a person does. But I'm finding that these Gemini models are finally able to replace searches and stackoverflow for a lot of my day-to-day programming.
I find this sentiment increasingly worrisome. It's entirely clear that every last human will be beaten on code design in the upcoming years (I am not going to argue if it's 1 or 5 years away, who cares?)
I wished people would just stop holding on to what amounts to nothing, and think and talk more about what can be done in a new world. We need good ideas and I think this could be a place to advance them.
* "it's too hard!"
* "my coworkers will just ruin it"
* "startups need to pursue PMF, not architecture"
* "good design doesn't get you promoted"
And now we have "AI will do it better soon."
None of those are entirely wrong. They're not entirely correct, either.
This turns out to be a big issue. I read everything about software design I could get my hands on in years, but then at an actual large company it turned out to not help, because I'd never read anything about how to get others to follow the advice in my head from all that reading.
Asking one to make changes to such a code set, and you will get whatever branch the dice told the tree to go down that day.
To paraphrase, “LLMs are like a box of chocolates…”.
And if you have the patience to try and tack the AI to get back on track, you probably could have just done the work faster yourself.