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Human coders are still better than LLMs

antirez.com

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#101

Post by devjab »

yua_mikami wrote: post #42

The thing everyone forgets when talking about LLMs replacing coders is that there is much more to software engineering than writing code, in fact that's probably one of the smaller aspects of the job. One major aspect of software engineering is social, requirements analysis and figuring out what the customer actually wants, they often don't know. If a human engineer struggles to figure out what a customer wants and a…

LLM's do no software engineering at all, and that can be fine. Because you don't actually need software engineering to create successful programs. Some applications will not even need software engineering for their entire life cycles because nobody is really paying attention to efficiency in the ocean of poor cloud management anyway.

I actually imagine it's the opposite of what you say here. I think technically inclined "IT business partners" will be able of creating applications entirely without software engineers... Because I see that happen every day in the world of green energy. The issues come later, when things have to be maintained, scale or become efficient. This is where the software engineering comes in, because it actually matters if you used a list or a generator in your Python app when it iterates over millions of items and not just a few hundreds.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#102

Post by taormina »

nixpulvis wrote: post #90

The number one use case for AI for me as a programmer is still help finding functions which are named something I didn't expect as I'm learning a new language/framework/library. Doing the actual thinking is generally not the part I need too much help with. Though it can replace googling info in domains I'm less familiar with. The thing is, I don't trust the results as much and end up needing to verify it anyways. If…

My problem with this usage is that the LLMs seem equally likely to make up a function they wish existed. When questioned about the seeming-too-convenient method they will usually admit to having made it up on the spot. (This happens a lot in Flutter/Flame land, I'm sure it's better at something more mainstream like Python?) That being said, I do agree that using it as supplemental documentation is one of the better usecases I have for it.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#103

Post by jonator »

prmph wrote: post #81

There's something fundamental here. There is a principle (I forget where I encountered it) that it is not code itself that is valuable, but the knowledge of a specific domain that an engineering team develops as they tackle a project. So code itself is a liability, but the domain knowledge is what is valuable. This makes sense to me and matched my long experience with software projects. So, if we are entrusting codin…

I believe it will raise the standard of what is valuable. Now that LLMs can now handle what we consider "mundane" parts of building a project (boilerplate), humans can dedicate focused efforts to the higher impact areas of innovation and problem solving. As LLMs get better, this bar simply continues to rise.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#105

Post by vFunct »

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.

No guarantee that will happen. LLMs are still statistically based. It's not going to give you edgier ideas, like filling a glass of wine to the rim.

Use them for the 90% of your repetitive uncreative work. The last 10% is up to you.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#106

Post by 3cats-in-a-coat »

"Better" is relative to context. It's a multi-dimensional metric flattened to a single comparison. And humans don't always win that comparison.

LLMs are faster, and when the task can be synthetically tested for correctness, and you can build up to it heuristically, humans can't compete. I can't spit out a full game in 5 minutes, can you?

LLMs are also cheaper.

LLMs are also obedient and don't get sick, and don't sleep.

Humans are still better by other criteria. But none of this matters. All disruptions start from the low end, and climb from there. The climbing is rapid and unstoppable.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#107

Post by bossyTeacher »

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…

I think of them as highly sycophant LSD-minded 2nd year student who has done some programming

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#108

Post by fl7305 »

jdiff wrote: post #91
cortesoft wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently, I find AI to be a really good autocomplete

The crazy thing is that people think that a model designed to predict sequences of tokens from a stem, no matter how advanced the model, to be much more than just "really good autocomplete." It is impressive and very unintuitive just how far that can get you, but it's not reductive to use that label. That's what it is on a fundamental level, and aligning your usage with that will allow it to be more effective.

> "The crazy thing is that people think that a model designed to"

It's even crazier that some people believe that humans "evolved" intelligence just by nature selecting the genes which were best at propagating.

Clearly, human intelligence is the product of a higher being designing it.

/s

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#109

Post by dbacar »

I disagree—'human coders' is a broad and overly general term. Sure, Antirez might believe he's better than AI when it comes to coding Redis internals , but across the broader programming landscape—spanning hundreds of languages, paradigms, and techniques—I'm confident AI has the upper hand.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#110

Post by vouaobrasil »

sofal wrote: post #100
vouaobrasil wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I am. Lots of unusual skills I have, have already been taken by AI. That's not to say I think I'm in trouble, but I think it's sad I can't apply some of these skills that I learned just a couple of years ago like audio editing because AI does it now. Neither do I want to work as an AI operator, which I find boring and depressing. So, I've just moved onto something else, but it's still discouraging. Also,…

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 enjoyable. For you, debugging might be fun but I hate it. Etc.

But the point is, if AI takes away everything which people find enjoyable, then no one can pick and choose to earn a living on those subset of tasks that they find enjoyable because AI can do everything.

Programmers tend to assume that AI will just take the boring tasks, because high-level software engineering is what they enjoy and unlikely to be automated, but there's a WHOLE world of people out there who enjoy other tasks that can be automated by AI.

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