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ashwinsundar | on: How I write software with LLMs
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 | parent | next
Your Karpathy quote there is out of context. It starts with: 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 | root | parent
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?

stavros | parent | next
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.

ChrisGreenHeur | parent | next
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.
imiric | parent
> 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?

| root | parent
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