7 ms·

I recently tried to encourage my smart, technical, but not-programmer friend to build an app using LLMs and he was just like, "I still have no idea where to eve

I recently tried to encourage my smart, technical, but not-programmer friend to build an app using LLMs and he was just like, "I still have no idea where to even start." People talk a lot about how "real programmers" used to have to clean up or actually deploy everyone's half-baked MS Access app, and that sort of thing will probably still be the case for a while.

dofm 3d ago
> to clean up or actually deploy everyone's half-baked MS Access app So we are switching to LLMs to be fucking miserable in our jobs?
- entrope 3d ago
  The whole point of the MS Access reference is that similar situations have been tropes since at least the 1990s. Bad code generated by someone who doesn't know how to program well -- whether that person is supposed to be a professional programmer but is incompetent, or has a different job -- is nothing new, and neither is having competent programmers clean it up. LLMs probably generate more of it, but can also fix a lot of it, or at least patch it up. A year ago, LLMs were not useful for me as a programmer. Now they are: the models are better, they can use long contexts more effectively, and the harnesses are better at helping the models. Nowadays my job is mostly not programming, but LLMs let me organize and prepare tools in spare time rather than needing days or weeks of attention. I would not trust them on a 200k+ line project -- and Claude Opus 5 has issues even on 50k LOC projects -- but they absolutely can help given good direction and a narrow enough scope.
  - dofm 3d ago
    > The whole point of the MS Access reference is that similar situations have been tropes since at least the 1990s. I do actually understand that. I have done this very put the Access database on the web job myself. (FWIW I was well-paid for it and the firm I worked for earned a fortune, but this was in 1997)
  - entrope 3d ago
    Then I don't understand at all what point you were trying to make about being miserable in our jobs. Cleaning up after bad code has always been part of the job for decades; so has balancing the creation of new technical debt against resource availability.

dofm 3d ago

> to clean up or actually deploy everyone's half-baked MS Access app So we are switching to LLMs to be fucking miserable in our jobs?

entrope 3d ago
The whole point of the MS Access reference is that similar situations have been tropes since at least the 1990s. Bad code generated by someone who doesn't know how to program well -- whether that person is supposed to be a professional programmer but is incompetent, or has a different job -- is nothing new, and neither is having competent programmers clean it up. LLMs probably generate more of it, but can also fix a lot of it, or at least patch it up. A year ago, LLMs were not useful for me as a programmer. Now they are: the models are better, they can use long contexts more effectively, and the harnesses are better at helping the models. Nowadays my job is mostly not programming, but LLMs let me organize and prepare tools in spare time rather than needing days or weeks of attention. I would not trust them on a 200k+ line project -- and Claude Opus 5 has issues even on 50k LOC projects -- but they absolutely can help given good direction and a narrow enough scope.
- dofm 3d ago
  > The whole point of the MS Access reference is that similar situations have been tropes since at least the 1990s. I do actually understand that. I have done this very put the Access database on the web job myself. (FWIW I was well-paid for it and the firm I worked for earned a fortune, but this was in 1997)
- entrope 3d ago
  Then I don't understand at all what point you were trying to make about being miserable in our jobs. Cleaning up after bad code has always been part of the job for decades; so has balancing the creation of new technical debt against resource availability.