Amdahl's Law for LLM generated code
LLMs may theoretically be able to generate millions of correct lines of code. But for any important code the only way to know that it's correct is to hand-audit every line, which is harder than writing every line because this allows you to build a conceptual hierarchy and model within which you can think about the code. So there's a fundamental limit to the speedup from LLMs when writing anything you care about. (The main objection will be what about when you have a human engineer working on your behalf. But this is a distraction: sometimes you can fully trust an engineer, which is not at all true for LLMs.) 1 comments on Hacker News.
LLMs may theoretically be able to generate millions of correct lines of code. But for any important code the only way to know that it's correct is to hand-audit every line, which is harder than writing every line because this allows you to build a conceptual hierarchy and model within which you can think about the code. So there's a fundamental limit to the speedup from LLMs when writing anything you care about. (The main objection will be what about when you have a human engineer working on your behalf. But this is a distraction: sometimes you can fully trust an engineer, which is not at all true for LLMs.)
LLMs may theoretically be able to generate millions of correct lines of code. But for any important code the only way to know that it's correct is to hand-audit every line, which is harder than writing every line because this allows you to build a conceptual hierarchy and model within which you can think about the code. So there's a fundamental limit to the speedup from LLMs when writing anything you care about. (The main objection will be what about when you have a human engineer working on your behalf. But this is a distraction: sometimes you can fully trust an engineer, which is not at all true for LLMs.) 1 comments on Hacker News.
LLMs may theoretically be able to generate millions of correct lines of code. But for any important code the only way to know that it's correct is to hand-audit every line, which is harder than writing every line because this allows you to build a conceptual hierarchy and model within which you can think about the code. So there's a fundamental limit to the speedup from LLMs when writing anything you care about. (The main objection will be what about when you have a human engineer working on your behalf. But this is a distraction: sometimes you can fully trust an engineer, which is not at all true for LLMs.)
Hacker News story: Amdahl's Law for LLM generated code
![Hacker News story: Amdahl's Law for LLM generated code]()
Reviewed by Tha Kur
on
May 26, 2026
Rating:
No comments: