Verification
Confirming that what was produced is actually correct. Generation got cheap; this did not, and it is now the constraint.
Also called the verification gap
Producing a candidate implementation now costs very little. Establishing that it is correct still costs about what it always did, and we have to do it much more often.
That gap makes tests more important and turns evaluation design into senior work. It also makes the reviewer a bottleneck. "It works" means little when nobody can say what was checked.
I can produce several times more code than before. My capacity to confirm that code is correct has barely changed. Most of my current problems fit somewhere inside that gap.
See also Comprehension debt and The control arm.
Linked from
- In defense of reading every word post
- In defense of the boring harness post
- In defense of the control arm post
- In defense of the player-coach post
- register_globals and the whole catastrophe post
- RIP the org chart that assumed typing was the bottleneck post
- Toward an audit log your agent cannot lie to post
- Why I went back to the keyboard post
- Comprehension debt topic
- Event sourcing topic
- Harness topic
- Player-coach topic
- The control arm topic