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Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

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Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

#191

Post by WhyComboNadir »

theappsecguy wrote: post #183
WhyComboNadir wrote: post #170

Lots of reactions here, but if it works for you then that's great. For me I feel that LLMs have exploded (in a good way) my cognitive capabilities. I'm now the general of an army, rather than playing the role of a soldier. Of course that means that I lose the experience of being the lonely soldier, but it is a no-brainer tradeoff for me. Anyway, I have to go now so I can push my car to the grocery store (so I don't f…

I feel like you think the car analogy was a clever parallel to draw here but looking at a car centric north american population and the dimensions of a non trivial slice of them that are unable to walk a 5k, id say you made the opposite point.

You have a point based on the way I wrote it. What I was trying to get at:

If you're going to walk to the store, don't push you car there! Just walk. So if you want to write code, don't retype what the LLM said, create your code from your own brain.

Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

#192

Post by nunez »

f311a wrote: post #31

This does not sound fun. It's better to work on your side projects with manual coding. You will learn more. Retyping things is inefficient for learning. It's like trying to retype calculus solutions — you don't learn from it. Even if there is an explanation of why the code is written in such a way, you did not come up with it, and you don't know alternative solutions. It is a practice for memorizing, not for building…

Everyone learns differently. Retyping was extremely helpful for me. The key, for me, was to look up what I didn't understand.

Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

#194

Post by tempfile »

ainch wrote: post #32
f311a wrote: post #31

This does not sound fun. It's better to work on your side projects with manual coding. You will learn more. Retyping things is inefficient for learning. It's like trying to retype calculus solutions — you don't learn from it. Even if there is an explanation of why the code is written in such a way, you did not come up with it, and you don't know alternative solutions. It is a practice for memorizing, not for building…

I'm not sure I agree about retyping calculus solutions. I often find that writing out a proof or derivation forces me to engage with some minor detail that I hadn't fully appreciated beforehand. That usually raises productive questions.

It is far, far less effective than deriving the solution yourself. Don't take my word for it:

> If you absolutely cannot do it then go home and think but for heavens sakes don't look it up in a book till you give up. Looking it up in a book is giving up. > > Paul Halmos (https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~adutta/blog/quotations-powerful...)

Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

#195

Post by bonoboTP »

skydhash wrote: post #180
bonoboTP wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in academic ML research. Coding is mostly scoped to myself. And it's often nontrivial. My communication is more in papers, reports on experimental results, deciding what to try next, but how the code is organized is rarely the focus of discussion. Of course this may be entirely different in a software shop building routine features where the difficulty is indeed the social part and the software itself is more cle…

> Of course this may be entirely different in a software shop building routine features where the difficulty is indeed the social part and the software itself is more clearly understood. But I'd say that's when AI can be even more effective since it can do mundane coding even better proportionally than research code And here’s another fallacy that is always thrown around. Always underestimating the other’s tasks when…

So which is it? Is the coding part easy or hard? If it's easy and the task is mainly all the song and dance with the client, the stakeholders, getting approval and whatnot, then AI can take care of that easy coding and at least save that time. But then that is proportionally not much. I do have friends in industry, and they do sit quite a lot of hours in front of an IDE typing and fighting compilation issues, etc. It's not like they are always in meetings. I know people who work in the computer vision industry, 3D perception, and they have relatively few meetings and report to their boss occasionally, are not micromanaged, there is little red tape. They are getting real benefits from AI. It has eliminated several efficiency problems in their code that nobody took the time to fix, like consolidating repeated computations to just being done once, or similar things. They have solved a lot of CI pain with it, where they used to have an entire employee just taking care of keeping the CI in shape and updating it and remembering all the quirks, it's no longer a full time job, though also not fully automated. The CI person of course doesn't like the fact that his arcane knowledge has become un-moated. (I've worked on maintaining servers myself and I was the only one who really knew how it worked or how to fix it when it was broken, how to use it in specific special contexts, e.g. in context of a Slurm cluster. Today a lot of that hard-earned detailed knowledge is obviated by Claude, because it can answer similarly well to how I could, or better. So I have experienced such things myself too.)

I don't think we should be making sweeping claims. But everyone generalizes. The person on top claimed that productivity doesn't increase for competent people and that coding is anyway very easy. That may be true in some contexts but not in others. Some software jobs require a lot of face-to-face, others less. Some managers micromanage, others just care about results on a longer timeframe. Some people build technically difficult, computationally heavy code, deployed on special hardware with efficiency requirements, others deploy website-like iPhone apps and CRUD webapps all day. There's no single shape for a software-related job.

Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

#196

Post by chubot »

iwontberude wrote: post #166
clarionbell wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there is an unspoken assumption of long term maintainability when it comes to LLM generated software. We are still very early in this, so I don't want to make assumptions. In principle, it shouldn't be impossible to both write and maintain stable software, purely with agents. At least, I'm not aware of any actual reasons, backed by a proper theory. On the other hand. I've noticed some persistent issues wi…

It's a moot point. In Mag7 companies internal code gets thrown away within 2 years on average because of contract negotiations, new opensource projects that obviate need for the internal codebase, license changes, layoffs, etc, etc. We don't need long term maintainability because its already on its way to the garbage bin. Frankly it's always been this way.

Its' the exact opposite ... Google, nVidia, Amazon, Apple, etc. all have a deep bench of code that is a moat. They have lots of throwaway code too, but those companies are precisely the ones that pay attention to code quality, and comprehensibility by experts

A rough proxy for this would be if they say contribute to the C++ standards process, which Google Microsoft nVidia do, and basically zero "normal" companies (say SaaS) do. It means they are investing in multi-decade maintenance of their codebase

Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

#197

Post by catlifeonmars »

WhyComboNadir wrote: post #170

Lots of reactions here, but if it works for you then that's great. For me I feel that LLMs have exploded (in a good way) my cognitive capabilities. I'm now the general of an army, rather than playing the role of a soldier. Of course that means that I lose the experience of being the lonely soldier, but it is a no-brainer tradeoff for me. Anyway, I have to go now so I can push my car to the grocery store (so I don't f…

Don’t good generals know how everyone else in their army does their jobs? At the very least to the extent they can see through the bullshit.

For example, I don’t handwrite the code that the compiler produces, but I know how to troubleshoot the IR/assembly and fix optimization issues that arise occasionally. That makes me better at my job of directing the compiler.

Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

#198

Post by preg_match »

xpct wrote: post #168
baq wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frontier LLMs write better code at CRUD tasks than 95% of developers today. They’ll get to 95% of most niche coding domains by December and likely all coding tasks sometime next year; 99% better at all tasks by December 2028. You may be correct now and it doesn’t matter one bit.

I'd say as long as we can clearly see the 5% are working better than an LLM, why not strive for it? Shows what humans are capable of, and it's probably achievable to most. I'm not hanging my hat yet and can still see where LLMs struggle. I think it's the best bet you can make: keep working for the future where you'll still be needed, because you can't prepare for the future where you're not.

How this presents, however, I would think, is that being that top 5% and utilizing LLMs will get you further than either alone.

Re: Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

#200

Post by 2190asfg »

WhyComboNadir wrote: post #170

Lots of reactions here, but if it works for you then that's great. For me I feel that LLMs have exploded (in a good way) my cognitive capabilities. I'm now the general of an army, rather than playing the role of a soldier. Of course that means that I lose the experience of being the lonely soldier, but it is a no-brainer tradeoff for me. Anyway, I have to go now so I can push my car to the grocery store (so I don't f…

Managers famously get dumber but think they get smarter and then start to write army metaphors.
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