There are two kinds of engineers. Those who can’t stop raving about how much of a superpower LLMs are for coding, how it’s made them 100x more productive, and is unlocking things they could’ve never done before. And those who, like you, find it to be an extremely finicky process that requires extreme amount of coddling to get average results at best. The only thing I don’t understand is why people from the former gro…
I am very much in that category.
I would describe my experience as the old adage "why keep a dog and bark yourself".
And no, I don't buy into people who say you have to engage in "prompt engineering". That's bullshit. Let's face it "prompt engineering" is a synonym for "I have to waste time coming up with hacky workarounds to make this dumb LLM come up with something usable".
In the end, its always quicker and easier to do it myself. And unless you are fresh out of school, if you've got more than 10 minutes of coding experience, you will always do a better job than the LLM.
Every time a new LLM model comes out, I fall into the same old trap "oh well, this one must be better, surely" I say to myself.
And yet its always the same "you can't polish a turd but you can roll it in glitter" experience.
I'm sick and tired of LLMs hallucinating shit.
I'm sick and tired of LLMs inventing functions that have been available in stdlib for years.
I'm sick and tired of LLMs generating useless code with boilerplate subfunctions that just contain a single commented "implement it yourself" line.
On top of that LLMs are simply terrible for the environment, guzzling up all that electricity, producing nothing but hot air and bullshit results in return.
Basically I'm sick and tired of LLMs and all the LLM fetishists that surround them.
