Of course you can go faster if you don’t read the code at all, that’s always been true. But it seems like the ability to emit large quantities of text is already a huge leap in productivity. I don’t think these tools are good enough yet to offload all or our thinking into them.

I've never been the kind of coder who could sit down and get their thoughts out from mind to written lines. I've seen that happen in a few gifted individuals, and AI might be frustrating them, because for them, coding was never the bottleneck, but for me, I would always get stuck in analysis paralysis, and just writing the first line of a project was a daunting prospect.

With AI I'm able to construct an entire ecosystem of programs I've always wanted.

The code isn't perfect, but I understand enough to fix architectural mistakes and to guide the AI to a good enough solution.

I've also tried to understand the code that AI writes, but it's often insane and untangling it would slow me down so much that it would nullify the gains in speed that AI brings.

To me, either companies realize they're spending a lot more money to ship crappier code and AI becomes a niche, or we'll just stop looking at code. I don't think there's any other option because I don't see AI getting better at it. It seems to actually be getting worse and more annoying to use.

Also relevant: including libraries written by others in your own software.

As always it comes down to finding a healthy balance.

> I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what software would look like if we made keeping software understandable to humans a first-class design goal in the age of AI.

I agree, and I've been thinking similarly. But I don't think there's anything "new" about what understandable and well-factored code should look like. It's the same principles as ever.

A lot of agent-written code looks like what you'd get if you gave an enthusiastic human slightly too many stimulants and asked them to take the shortest path to reach the goal. Plausibly this is just a result of the LLMs not being "smart enough" to do any better, but I think there's also an incentives problem. How do you reward human-understandability in benchmarks and unsupervised training?

No, I specifically don’t. My company owns it, and that bastard will lay me off without a second thought.

Analogously, people can write in assembly, but can you write in assembly when the codebase is frequently altered by someone with an optimizing compiler?

[1] - Do higher levels of abstractions even exist? By my way of thinking that's called not an abstraction. C isn't a higher level of abstraction; it's a different abstraction implemented by assembly. There are more powerful abstractions and more ergonomic abstractions, but that doesn't make them 'higher level'.