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[return to "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"]
1. jatins+QD[view] [source] 2025-06-03 02:04:03
>>tablet+(OP)
Everything about that is true but, and that's a big BUT, the code I write with LLM I can only iterate on it with an LLM.

My mind doesn't develop a mental model of that code, I don't know where the relevant parts are, I can't quickly navigate through it and I have to reach the LLM for every small change.

Which is why I like Copilot style editing more than agents as a working model but agents are just so much more powerful and smarter thanks to everything available to them.

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2. 59nadi+Hf2[view] [source] 2025-06-03 16:23:00
>>jatins+QD
This is in line with "Programming As Theory Building"[0] (Peter Naur, 1985) that puts forward the idea that when one is building a system one builds a "theory" (in a sense a mapping of what, where and why) of that system that is essential for continued work on it. Once I internalized this idea it helped me make sense of why rewrites are not "never a good idea" and simultaneously why they are so fraught with peril, as well as what kind of onboarding actually makes sense for work on a system. It's also why I can never get on board with the passive "review code an LLM spits out" type of development; it just does not build theory as reliably, effectively and efficiently.

It's a good, very digestible paper, in my opinion; well worth the read.

[0] - https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf

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