DESCRIPTION: Idiots, idiots everywhere.

Now I can accurately summarize what coding using LLMs actually /is in just a few sentences.

Recall how people usually describe a code maintenance job: we have this code to run, while the original developers are gone and leave us no design documentation.

This hypothetical situation is exactly what you get when an LLM finished spewing out the slop: you now have some code, very cheap, even for free, but it is not yours, the underlying understanding (of the whys) is not in your head, and the original developer is already gone. Disappeared.

End of the summary.

Now you have to make sure that this slop (which, again, is not yours) at least runs correctly. How do you know that it is correct?

Oh, there is a whole sub-field of computer science which is devoted to program correctness and it is in a miserable state.

Guess what? The only viable way to know that the code is correct is to have an understanding of what it supposed to do, have this understanding expressed in terms of a very special programming language, and then run special tools which would mechanically verify that each expression is correct.

Another way is to express your understanding of the domain as a mathematical model, encode that mathematical model in TLA+ and then use it to verify that the model (not the code) has no contradictions and no obvious flaws.

Then one has to express (write down) a presumably correct model in code without introducing any error on the way.

In short, a crappy code is very cheap and sometimes even free because it is understanding what programming really is, while coding is just a mechanical skill. Even LLMs appears to be able to code, but not (and never) to actually program.

The current propaganda says that if (when) you already /understand the domain, then (and only then) the generated AI slop will be helpful and will even “boost your productivity”. This is bullshit. Please pause and re-read a few paragraphs above.

And yes, tests (of all kinds) will never show the absence of bugs even in your own code.