Answering this often triggers more questions that shouldn't surprise anyone. Do you have some workable requirements? Have you created meaningful tests aligned with those? Can you understand and fix your code when those tests fail? Are you seeing opportunities to delete code in a way that enhances its value by reducing its liability? In all of these questions, code is ingrained with purpose, hampered by ambiguity, and therefore very much human, even when it lies forgotten in some machine where it still happens to create value for stakeholders. But how can AI align with these tasks that we ourselves aren't so sure about? To map that territory, people are planting flags across different dimensions of AI coding. Imagine these as different spectrums that can plot to different points hovering between prototyping and production.
Some basic steps for making software are usually described as: make it work, make it right, make it fast. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer no guarantees about any of that, but at least they can write and review code. As a new tool, they unlock an abundance of code and documentation that can vary between pretty good to deceptively plausible. So if accumulating lines of code doesn't mean you have a working piece of software, how useful can LLMs be?Answering this often triggers more questions that shouldn't surprise anyone. Do you have some workable requirements? Have you created meaningful tests aligned with those? Can you understand and fix your code when those tests fail? Are you seeing opportunities to delete code in a way that enhances its value by reducing its liability? In all of these questions, code is ingrained with purpose, hampered by ambiguity, and therefore very much human, even when it lies forgotten in some machine where it still happens to create value for stakeholders. But how can AI align with these tasks that we ourselves aren't so sure about? To map that territory, people are planting flags across different dimensions of AI coding. Imagine these as different spectrums that can plot to different points hovering between prototyping and production.
The presence of code
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