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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#131

Post by Epa095 »

apwell23 wrote: post #126
Epa095 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, how much of coding is really never done before? And secondly, what you say are false (at least if taken literally). I can create a new programming language, give the definition of it in the prompt, ask it to code something in my language, and expect something out. It might even work.

> how much of coding is really never done before? A lot because we use libraries for 'done frequently before' code. i don't generate a database driver for my webapp with llm.

We use libraries for SOME of the 'done frequently' code.

But how much of enterprise programming is 'get some data from a database, show it on a Web page (or gui), store some data in the database', with variants?

It makes sense that we have libraries for abstraction away some common things. But it also makes sense that we can't abstract away everything we do multiple times, because at some point it just becomes so abstract that it's easier to write it yourself than to try to configure some library. Does not mean that it's not a variant of something done before.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#132

Post by Jolter »

bgwalter wrote: post #114
UncleOxidant wrote: post #71

There's some whistling past the graveyard in these comments. "You still need humans for the social element...", "LLMs are bad at debugging", "LLMs lead you astray". And yeah, there's lots of truth in those assertions, but since I started playing with LLMs to generate code a couple of years ago they've made huge strides. I suspect that over the next couple of years the improvements won't be quite as large (Pareto Prin…

Yet you are working on your own replacement, while your colleagues are taking the prudent approach.

Here’s the deal: if you won’t write your replacement, a competitor will do it and outprice your employer. Either way you’re out of a job. May be more prudent to adapt to the new tools and master them rather than be left behind?

Do you want to be a jobless weaver, or an engineer building mechanical looms for a higher pay than the weaver got?

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#133

Post by sofal »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #110
sofal wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't acquire skills and apply them just to be able to apply them. I use them to solve problems and create things. My learned skills for processing audio are for the purpose of getting the audio sounding the way I want it to sound. If an AI can do that for me instead, that's amazing and frees up my time to do other things or do a lot more different audio things. None of this is scary to me or impacts my personal di…

I acquire skills to enjoy applying them, period. I'm less concerned about the final result than about the process to get there. That's the different between technical types and artist types I suppose. Edit: I also should say, we REALLY should distinguish between tasks that you find enjoyable and tasks you find just drudgery to get where you want to go. For you, audio editing might be a drudgery but for me it's enjoya…

I can't tell whether I'm supposed to be the technical type or the artist type in this analogy. In my music making hobby, I'd like a good AI to help me mix, master, or any number of things under my direction. I'm going to be very particular about every aspect of the beat, but maybe it could suggest some non-boring chord progressions and I'll decide if I like one of them. My goal as an artist is to express myself, and a good AI that can faithfully take directions from me would help.

As a software engineer, I need to solve business problems, and much of this requires code changes, testing, deployments, all that stuff we all know. Again, if a good AI could take on a lot of that work, maybe that means I don't have to sit there in dependency hell and fight arcane missing symbol errors for the rest of my fucking career.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#134

Post by [deleted] »

Epa095 wrote: post #131
apwell23 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how much of coding is really never done before? A lot because we use libraries for 'done frequently before' code. i don't generate a database driver for my webapp with llm.

We use libraries for SOME of the 'done frequently' code. But how much of enterprise programming is 'get some data from a database, show it on a Web page (or gui), store some data in the database', with variants? It makes sense that we have libraries for abstraction away some common things. But it also makes sense that we can't abstract away everything we do multiple times, because at some point it just becomes so abs…

[deleted]

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#135

Post by Fernicia »

elzbardico wrote: post #129

I use LLMs a lot, and call me arrogant, but every time I see a developer saying that LLMs will substitute them, I think they are probably shitty developers.

If it automates 1/5th of your work, then what's unreasonable about thinking that your team could be 4 developers instead of 5?

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#136

Post by nevertoolate »

darkport wrote: post #34

I think this is true for deeply complex problems, but For everyday tasks an LLM is infinitely “better”. And by better, I don’t mean in terms of code quality because ultimately that doesn’t matter for shipping code/products, as long as it works. What does matter is speed. And an LLM speeds me up at least 10x.

How do you measure this?

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#137

Post by kelseydh »

gerad wrote: post #52
mattnewton wrote: post #5

This matches my experience. I actually think a fair amount of value from LLM assistants to me is having a reasonably intelligent rubber duck to talk to. Now the duck can occasionally disagree and sometimes even refine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging I think the big question everyone wants to skip right to and past this conversation is, will this continue to be true 2 years from now? I don’t kno…

It's like chess. Humans are better for now, they won't be forever, but humans plus software is going to better than either alone for a long time.

The time where humans + computers in chess were better than just computers was not a long time. That era ended well over a decade ago. Might have been true for only 3-5 years.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#138

Post by bgwalter »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #117
bgwalter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the Centaur hypothesis in the early days of chess programs and it hasn't been true for a long time. Chess programs of course have a well defined algorithm. "AI" would be incapable of even writing /bin/true without having seen it before. It certainly wouldn't have been able to write Redis.

> This was the Centaur hypothesis in the early days of chess programs and it hasn't been true for a long time. > Chess programs of course have a well defined algorithm. Ironically, that also "hasn't been true for a long time". The best chess engines humans have written with "defined algorithms" were bested by RL (alphazero) engines a long time ago. The best of the best are now NNUE + algos (latest stockfish). And eve…

No, the alphazero papers used an outdated version of Stockfish for comparison and have always been disputed.

Stockfish NNUE was announced to be 80 ELO higher than the default. I don't find it frustrating. NNs excel at detecting patterns in a well defined search space.

Writing evaluation functions is tedious. It isn't a sign of NN intelligence.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#139

Post by betenoire »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #110
sofal wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't acquire skills and apply them just to be able to apply them. I use them to solve problems and create things. My learned skills for processing audio are for the purpose of getting the audio sounding the way I want it to sound. If an AI can do that for me instead, that's amazing and frees up my time to do other things or do a lot more different audio things. None of this is scary to me or impacts my personal di…

I acquire skills to enjoy applying them, period. I'm less concerned about the final result than about the process to get there. That's the different between technical types and artist types I suppose. Edit: I also should say, we REALLY should distinguish between tasks that you find enjoyable and tasks you find just drudgery to get where you want to go. For you, audio editing might be a drudgery but for me it's enjoya…

I'm with you, I enjoy the craftsmanship of my trade. I'm not relieved that I may not have to do it in the future, I'm bummed that it feels like something I'm good at, and is/was worth something, is being taken away.

I realize how lucky I am to even have a job that I thoroughly enjoy, do well, and get paid well for. So I'm not going to say "It's not fair!", but ... I'm bummed.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#140

Post by mirsadm »

Retric wrote: post #76
smokel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stating this without any arguments is not very convincing. Perhaps you remember that language models were completely useless at coding some years ago, and now they can do quite a lot of things, even if they are not perfect. That is progress, and that does give reason to extrapolate. Unless of course you mean something very special with "solving programming".

Progress sure, but the rate the’ve improved hasn’t been particularly fast recently . Programming has become vastly more efficient in terms of programmer effort over decades, but making some aspects of the job more efficient just means all your effort it spent on what didn’t improve.

The latest batch of LLMs has been getting worse in my opinion. Claude in particular seems to be going backwards with every release. The verbosity of the answers is infuriating. You ask it a simple question and it starts by inventing the universe, poorly
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