I'm trying to decide if I want to do an actual blog post on my perception of LLM code generation in in industry or if it would just be adding to the pile of hot takes in a space with so many already. The thrust of it would be that companies who employ software engineers and aren't in the business of selling software have always been more interested in the solution itself than the method, and our industry and the people in it have been struggling with that fact for my whole career (Agile being an example of one step of that struggle—at its core, Agile is an attempt to bridge a communications gap between people whose job it is to deliver solutions to real problems on a realistic timetable and people whose job it is to make the part of that solution that lives in fog and vapor, where many things about the eventual shape of the solution are not and cannot be known at the start, entirely unlike building a bridge or a building). So nothing about company Management's reaction to the sudden existence of a magic box that turns English descriptions of problems into code that attempts to solve those problems should be surprising; they've always thought about their entire software engineering department in those terms, and the interface is surprisingly similar, including the failure modes around "Oh, I didn't know that's what you were asking for." ... With a healthy healthy sprinkling of reminding those software engineers pulling down the six-figure incomes that this was always the job; nobody was actually paying us to make pretty things in code that only we could see the beauty of. They've been paying for results this whole time; the alignment of useful and aesthetically pleasing is irrelevant to the people paying the money. #LLM #softwareengineering