The glib response here would be to say that no technology is ever inevitable and that everything is contingent. This has the advantages of being technically true and sounding wise, but unfortunately technologies very much exist that a reasonable person might well label that way. Firearms are a good example of the latter case: once they've been developed, you quite quickly hit the situation where if you want to maintain your independence and safety in a society, you have to either use one or have one used on your behalf: no other options really work.
One of my least popular opinions is that lines of (good, tested, understood) code is actually a useful metric.
It only becomes useless the moment you start measuring it and telling employees that it’s part of how you evaluate their work.
There are skills required in either case, and from what I’ve read, it seems it requires just as much attention to detail to keep the LLM from going “off-script”
Right, that’s what I’m getting at when I talk about skill. You need to know what good code looks like, and understand the peccadillos of coding agents, and know how to productively counteract those peccadillos and get them to produce good code.
One of my least popular opinions is that lines of (good, tested, understood) code is actually a useful metric.
It only becomes useless the moment you start measuring it and telling employees that it’s part of how you evaluate their work.
Right, that’s what I’m getting at when I talk about skill. You need to know what good code looks like, and understand the peccadillos of coding agents, and know how to productively counteract those peccadillos and get them to produce good code.
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A fine example of Goodhart’s law.
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