Imagine you need to write a long piece of text that requires you to think things through, gather information, and analyze it. Then you have to write the text itself, proofread it, correct any errors, and refine the wording. Let’s say you spend 10 hours on this task. Now
I can’t recall ever wishing the code I was reading had more soul. In fact, usually when the soul of the author shines through, it’s because the code is too exciting and makes me nervous that it’s overly complex. I agree LLMs are terrible at writing prose; it ends up sounding very unnatural and readability suffers. But for the code itself, more often than not, you can achieve precisely the desired result by doing a little up front discussion with the LLM about implementation strategy, plus some revision at the end.
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To be clear, I’m not saying that the technology resulting from a software project should lack soul. It’s obviously a great thing when the authors of an application put a lot of care into designing its UX and operational efficiency; this is an art that LLMs do poorly today. But that is pretty much orthogonal from how the code reads. There is incredible, well-designed software out there which reads as totally boring, and that’s generally considered a good thing.
Also I’m not claiming that it is easy to do that; crafting boring code that still functions as intended is quite difficult. I’ve never seen an LLM do this without lots of hand-holding. The human touch is essential, but that doesn’t imply that a person using an LLM suddenly has stunted vision and lack of aesthetic.