That doesn’t change the fact that it’s harder to properly review code than to write code, especially when that code is ten times longer than it needs to be, makes no sensible decisions about how to separate concerns, and might, if you’re lucky, pay lip service to naming things well.

I don’t necessarily think this will always be the case with generated code, but I expect we’ll need a proper breakthrough in the technology before it can write good code (it needs a number of things: actual world models, the ability to go back and edit its output when it realises a mistake – which is crucially different from saying a new thing that contradicts the mistake – and continual learning, to name the three that spring to mind).

Even if it started writing perfect code, I’d be dubious of signing your org’s ability to write code away to a service that you don’t own and has a notable history of intellectual property infringement and an insane disregard for both the law and morality. At the very least we should all be using open weights models.

It is a very well known truism that it is harder to debug code than it is to write it. This is, in my experience, doubly true of the convoluted code generated by current frontier LLMs.

Allowing LLM coding at our org basically stole most of this year’s progress from us as every PR made this way still has yet to be merged because the code quality just never reaches anywhere near our minimum requirement.

We are investigating ways to improve this (a style guide for agents etc) but the best step we’ve taken so far is just to ask people to stop using it and see what happens. (Code quality jumped up and PRs started getting merged, though the LLM ones are still languishing and probably will need rewriting from scratch before we can merge them)

I think BP popularized the idea in order to allow people to blame each other instead of the real perpetrators, people who knew they were destroying the planet decades ago and engaged in a well documented and persistent campaign to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt in any movement that would halt their crimes.

The idea of a carbon footprint was a gift from heaven for them as, under the weight of overwhelming evidence, they stopped being able to fight the idea that it was happening. Now they had to convince us all that the most ineffective possible strategy was the truth. Not only does the idea of personal responsibility for structural evils blind us to better strategies, it also conveniently polarises the issue, making people feel judged and pushing them away from the actual truth that climate change is very real, very deadly, and extraordinarily solvable with structural change.

I would have preferred we had the global political will to solve it decades ago by having a plan to ban the use of fossil fuels over a reasonable period (or some such), but we’re well past that world, and I now have hope that the economics of renewables will force the world’s hand, as they’re simply a cheaper option and continually getting moreso. That is to say I would have preferred the structural change be by the will of the people, but it seems it will have to be by the will of capital.

Whilst they didn’t invent it, BP put a lot of money into popularising the idea of a carbon footprint. It is a lie of a concept that blames the powerless for the actions of the powerful.

Do what you can to fight climate change, do what you can to reduce your emissions, but actions that can influence policy are a thousand times more important than any amount of reduction you can make in your own carbon footprint.