31–40 of 319 posts
the next 5+ years will see software proliferate rapidly as a result of things like chatgpt and llm augmented documentation pages. Building things end to end just got easier and will become more so soon.
I use LLM-based autocomplete in my IDE, and it’s not taking away my job unless/until it improves by multiple orders of magnitude. It’s good at filling in boilerplate, but even for that I have to carefully check its output because it can make little errors even when I feel like what I want should be obvious. The article is absolutely correct in saying you have to be critical of its output. I would say it improves my p…
> Software engineers should be critical of the outputs of large language models, as they tend to hallucinate and produce inaccurate or incorrect code. This seems to be the case more than not for certain tasks, anything assembler or C I have ever asked it has turned out to be at least somewhat wrong. Mixing styles and syntax all over the place. I am not afraid that some generative AI will take my job anytime soon.
I'm surviving just fine by not using any LLMs.
I'm not an expert, but I'd say I'm a strongly average vim user.
But even at that skill level with vim, I haven't seen an area where LLMs would increase my velocity.
Quite the opposite. It would completely interrupt my flow to have to constantly stop and do a code review while I'm writing.
With good plugins, templates and macros in vim/vscode - velocity writing code isn't the issue.
The stuff that takes all the time is UX tweaks and reasoning about architecture, business constraints, and the correct level of optimization for the company's maturity.
> Software engineers should be critical of the outputs of large language models, as they tend to hallucinate and produce inaccurate or incorrect code. This seems to be the case more than not for certain tasks, anything assembler or C I have ever asked it has turned out to be at least somewhat wrong. Mixing styles and syntax all over the place. I am not afraid that some generative AI will take my job anytime soon.
Thankfully, as a human I never produce inaccurate or incorrect code.
John Schwartz, in the role of "Italics" is reportedly "so highly trained that he can type code that compiles correctly almost 3% of the time"!
Remarkable!
https://www.cockos.com/team.php
(I think just about anyone 'serious' learns pretty quickly that compiler errors are in the 'our Lord and Saviour' category. Unusually distributed generally quite rare but easily catastrophic runtime 'Heisenbugs' are the fruit of the devil!)
Learning to code has become significantly easier because of ChatGPT, and many university students are already using it for learning. Not only can they let ChatGPT write boilerplate code, but they can also let ChatGPT write comments for code snippets they don't understand and explain unfamiliar syntax.
I wonder if coders can survive in a world where more and more people have coding skills. Edit: "majority" was not a good wording
I'm surviving just fine by not using any LLMs.
Me too. I'm not an expert, but I'd say I'm a strongly average vim user. But even at that skill level with vim, I haven't seen an area where LLMs would increase my velocity. Quite the opposite. It would completely interrupt my flow to have to constantly stop and do a code review while I'm writing. With good plugins, templates and macros in vim/vscode - velocity writing code isn't the issue. The stuff that takes all th…
But seriously, what developers do most of their time is maintanace, they spend a day searching for a bug, just to write maybe one line of code to fix it.
I use LLM-based autocomplete in my IDE, and it’s not taking away my job unless/until it improves by multiple orders of magnitude. It’s good at filling in boilerplate, but even for that I have to carefully check its output because it can make little errors even when I feel like what I want should be obvious. The article is absolutely correct in saying you have to be critical of its output. I would say it improves my p…