6 ms·

I wanted to know how to make softwares with LLM "without losing the benefit of knowing how the entire system works" and "intimately familiar with each project’s

I wanted to know how to make softwares with LLM "without losing the benefit of knowing how the entire system works" and "intimately familiar with each project’s architecture and inner workings", while "have never even read most of their code". (Because obviously, you can't.) But OP didn't explain that. You tell LLM to create something, and then use another LLM to review it. It might make the result safer, but it doesn't mean that YOU understand the architecture. No one does.

ashwinsundar 6mo ago
Hot take: you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you aren't writing code, designing the system, creating architecture, or even writing the prompt, then you're not understanding shit. You're playing slots with stochastic parrots The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works. - Karpathy 2025
- simonw 6mo ago
  Your Karpathy quote there is out of context. It starts with: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding. If you're paying attention to the code that's being produced you can guide it towards being just as high quality (or even higher quality) than code you would have written by hand.
  - ashwinsundar 6mo ago
    It's appropriate for the commenter I was replying to, who asked how they can understand things, "while having never even read most of their code." I like AI-assisted programming, but if I fail to even read the code produced, then I might as well treat it like a no-code system. I can understand the high-levels of how no-code works, but as soon as it breaks, it might as well be a black box. And this only gets worse as the codebase spans into the tens of thousands of lines without me having read any of it. The (imperfect) analogy I'm working on is a baker who bakes cakes. A nearby grocery store starts making any cake they want, on demand, so the baker decides to quit baking cakes and buy them from the store. The baker calls the store anytime they want a new cake, and just tells them exactly what they want. How long can that baker call themself a "baker"? How long before they forget how to even bake a cake, and all they can do is get cakes from the grocer?
- imiric 6mo ago
  > Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's insane that this quote is coming from one of the leading figures in this field. And everyone's... OK that software development has been reduced to chance and brute force?
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- ChrisGreenHeur 6mo ago
  the hardware you typed this on was designed by hardware architects that write little to no code. just types up a spec to be implemented by verilog coders.
  - il-b 6mo ago
    [dead]
- stavros 6mo ago
  There are two ways to approach this. One is a priori: "If you aren't doing the same things with LLMs that humans do when writing code, the code is not going to work". The other one is a posteriori: "I want code that works, what do I need to do with LLMs?" Your approach is the former, which I don't think works in reality. You can write code that works (for some definition of "works") with LLMs without doing it the way a human would do it.
  - ashwinsundar 6mo ago
    I re-read your comment a few times, but don't understand what you're saying unfortunately. You can write code that works (for some definition of "works") with LLMs without doing it the way a human would do it. Really having a hard time understanding what this possibly means.
    - stavros 6mo ago
      It means that just because a human can't read the code doesn't mean the code is not correct. Obfuscators exist, for example, and it's conceivable that the LLM writes perfectly correct code even though it's unmaintainable to us.
      - ashwinsundar 6mo ago
        Thanks, that's a good insight into my value system then. I understand that code doesn't have to be human-readable to be correct. I don't want to work on a codebase filled with unreadable code which no human colleague understands though. This is also why I don't like a lot of web frameworks - the final code outputted to the page is a huge spaghetti of un-inspectable Javascript and HTML. I want to have the ability to understand each relevant layer of the system, even if I don't necessarily have the full understanding at every given moment.
        stavros 6mo ago
        Sure, but that's more your preference than an objective way to do software "correctly". We're still figuring out what the latter means when LLMs are involved (hence my article here).

ashwinsundar 6mo ago

Hot take: you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you aren't writing code, designing the system, creating architecture, or even writing the prompt, then you're not understanding shit. You're playing slots with stochastic parrots The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works. - Karpathy 2025

simonw 6mo ago
Your Karpathy quote there is out of context. It starts with: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding. If you're paying attention to the code that's being produced you can guide it towards being just as high quality (or even higher quality) than code you would have written by hand.
- ashwinsundar 6mo ago
  It's appropriate for the commenter I was replying to, who asked how they can understand things, "while having never even read most of their code." I like AI-assisted programming, but if I fail to even read the code produced, then I might as well treat it like a no-code system. I can understand the high-levels of how no-code works, but as soon as it breaks, it might as well be a black box. And this only gets worse as the codebase spans into the tens of thousands of lines without me having read any of it. The (imperfect) analogy I'm working on is a baker who bakes cakes. A nearby grocery store starts making any cake they want, on demand, so the baker decides to quit baking cakes and buy them from the store. The baker calls the store anytime they want a new cake, and just tells them exactly what they want. How long can that baker call themself a "baker"? How long before they forget how to even bake a cake, and all they can do is get cakes from the grocer?
imiric 6mo ago
> Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's insane that this quote is coming from one of the leading figures in this field. And everyone's... OK that software development has been reduced to chance and brute force?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
ChrisGreenHeur 6mo ago
the hardware you typed this on was designed by hardware architects that write little to no code. just types up a spec to be implemented by verilog coders.
- il-b 6mo ago
  [dead]
stavros 6mo ago
There are two ways to approach this. One is a priori: "If you aren't doing the same things with LLMs that humans do when writing code, the code is not going to work". The other one is a posteriori: "I want code that works, what do I need to do with LLMs?" Your approach is the former, which I don't think works in reality. You can write code that works (for some definition of "works") with LLMs without doing it the way a human would do it.
- ashwinsundar 6mo ago
  I re-read your comment a few times, but don't understand what you're saying unfortunately. You can write code that works (for some definition of "works") with LLMs without doing it the way a human would do it. Really having a hard time understanding what this possibly means.
  - stavros 6mo ago
    It means that just because a human can't read the code doesn't mean the code is not correct. Obfuscators exist, for example, and it's conceivable that the LLM writes perfectly correct code even though it's unmaintainable to us.
    - ashwinsundar 6mo ago
      Thanks, that's a good insight into my value system then. I understand that code doesn't have to be human-readable to be correct. I don't want to work on a codebase filled with unreadable code which no human colleague understands though. This is also why I don't like a lot of web frameworks - the final code outputted to the page is a huge spaghetti of un-inspectable Javascript and HTML. I want to have the ability to understand each relevant layer of the system, even if I don't necessarily have the full understanding at every given moment.
      - stavros 6mo ago
        Sure, but that's more your preference than an objective way to do software "correctly". We're still figuring out what the latter means when LLMs are involved (hence my article here).