so what is it then? i used llms to write the code for a feature complete desktop screen dimming application. did i produce it, if not develop it? am i just a… logic guide? legitimately asking because the program works better than any available alternative

I would agree with that.

Especially, “being 70%” finished does not mean you will get a working product at all. If the fundamentale understanding is not there, you will not getting a working product without fundamental rewrites.

I have seen code from such bullshit developers myself. Vibe-coded device drivers where people do not understand the fundamentals of multi-threading. Why and when you need locks in C++. No clear API descriptions. Messaging architectures that look like a rats nest. Wild mix of synchronous and async code. Insistence that their code is self-documenting and needs neither comments nor doc. And: Agressivity when confronted with all that. Because the bullshit taints any working relationship.

I keep seeing the “it’s good for prototyping” argument they post here, in real life.

There are real cases where bugs aren’t a huge deal.

Take shell scripts. Bash is designed to make it really fast to write throwaway, often one-line software that can accomplish a lot with minimal time.

Bash is not, as a programming language, very optimized for catching corner cases, or writing highly-secure code, or highly-maintainable code. The great majority of bash code that I have written is throwaway code, stuff that I will use once and not even bother to save. It doesn’t have to handle all situations or be hardened. It just has to fill that niche of code that can be written really quickly. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable. I can imagine generated code with some bugs not being such a huge problem there. If it runs once and appears to work for the inputs in that particular scenario, that may be totally fine.

Or, take test code. I’m not going to spend a lot of time making test code perfect. If it fails, it’s probably not the end of the world. There are invariably cases that I won’t have written test code for. “Good enough” is often just fine there.

And it might be possible to, instead of (or in addition to) having human-written commit messages, generate descriptions of commits or something down the line for someone browsing code.

I still feel like I’m stretching, though. Like…I feel like what people are envisioning is some kind of self-improving AI software package, or just letting an LLM go and having it pump out a new version of Microsoft Office. And I’m deeply skeptical that we’re going to get there just on the back of LLMs. I think that we’re going to need more-sophisticated AI systems.

I remember working on one large, multithreaded codebase where a developer who isn’t familiar with or isn’t following the thread-safety constraints would create an absolute maintenance nightmare for others, where you’re going to spend way more time tracking down and fixing breakages induced than you saved by them not spending time coming up to speed on the constraints that their code needs to conform to. And the existing code-generation systems just aren’t really in a great position to come up to speed on those constraints. Part of what a programmer does is, when writing code, is to look at the human-language requirements, and identify that there are undefined cases and go back and clarify the requirement with the user, or use real-world knowledge to make reasonable calls. Training an LLM to map from an English-language description to code is creating a system that just doesn’t have the capability to do that sort of thing.

But, hey, we’ll see.

What you are doing is the coding equivalent of not reading the manual on a new appliance. It will work, but you will get surprised. Probably not in a good way.