Software Engineering Radio 732

Jason Gorman frames himself as an “AI realist” in this podcast and has some interesting observations. For example, here’s what he says about how riding the LLM cuts against our cognitive abilities:

By all means, read code and copy it. But it’s gotta go in the eyes, through the brain, and out the fingers to engage those parts of your brain that makes it sink in. It’s like everyone’s on speed dial and nobody can remember anyone’s number. And the moment you take that phone away, they can’t remember anyone’s number.

If you don’t listen, his post sums up a lot of the talking points in the podcast:

software development isn’t a production process […] AI coding is an amplifier of, not a fix for, development strengths and weaknesses.

Truly autonomous and reliable long-horizon agentic software development is so highly improbable using LLMs that it’s essentially science fiction.