Summer of Codex | Paylias
LLMs are here to stay and if we believe Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns proposed in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, then theoretically, they will improve at an exponential rate. However, their utility will depend on how proficient one gets at using them. LLMs are, in my opinion, a superset of a tool—much like a Swiss Army knife but with seemingly infinite sub-tools.
When I started writing code for Paylias, vibe coding wasn't as mainstream and the models weren't as sophisticated as they are today. I think GPT-3.5-turbo had just launched and people had started to scratch the surface of using LLMs for code generation, but agentic coding didn't exist (or if it did, I was too cheap to buy the subscription). So this meant that when Zed (my editor of choice) integrated agents into their editor, the codebase for Paylias had already grown to over 80,000 lines of Go code.
Given this, I wasn't going to let an AI model immediately start editing the codebase that I had, for the past 2 years, painstakingly worked on—but I was intrigued. I started getting help from LLMs to improve existing architecture for certain services, find bugs in my existing code and, on the rare occasion, let it write some unit tests.
