Interesting to hear the industrial SWE perspective, it is very different.
I am a scientific research engineer (bioinformatics), and here no one cares much about covering all the possible code paths.
What we care about is if the code computes "the correct thing", i.e. that it represents the underlying science.
No such guarantee with LLMs. But no such guarantee without LLMs, either (the "code growing above our heads" has happened already, a long time ago). Still, I would say that LLMs are a big net positive for us: they are better at checking such things than we are.
sjdv1982•1h ago
I am a scientific research engineer (bioinformatics), and here no one cares much about covering all the possible code paths.
What we care about is if the code computes "the correct thing", i.e. that it represents the underlying science.
No such guarantee with LLMs. But no such guarantee without LLMs, either (the "code growing above our heads" has happened already, a long time ago). Still, I would say that LLMs are a big net positive for us: they are better at checking such things than we are.