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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#141

Post by apwell23 »

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…

> it's easier to write it yourself than to try to configure some library

yeah unfortunately LLM will make this worse. Why abstract when you can generate.

I am already seeing this a lot at work :(

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#142

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#143

Post by spion »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #3

The question is, for how long?

Vibe-wise, it seems like progress is slowing down and recent models aren't substantially better than their predecessors. But it would be interesting to take a well-trusted benchmark and plot max_performance_until_date(foreach month). (Too bad aider changed recently and there aren't many older models; https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/by-release-date.html has not been updated in a while with newer stuff, and the new benchmark doesn't have the classic models such as 3.5, 3.5 turbo, 4, claude 3 opus)

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#145

Post by pandastronaut »

malfist wrote: post #55
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…

That was also one of the challenges during the offshoring craze in the 00s. The offshore teams did not have the power, or knowledge to push back on things and just built and built and built. Sounds very similar to AI right? Probably going to have the same outcome.

I tend to see today's AI Vibrators as the managers of the 00s and their army of offshore devs.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#146

Post by bluefirebrand »

hatefulmoron wrote: post #113
bluefirebrand wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's a kid out hoeing rows for corn. He sees someone planting with a tractor, and decides that's the way to go. Someone tells him, "If you get a tractor, you'll never develop the muscles that would make you really great at hoeing In this example the idea that losing the muscles that make you great at hoeing" seems kind of like a silly thing to worry about But I think there's a second order effect here. The kid ge…

> my point is that I think after driving a tractor for a while, the kid would really struggle to go hoe by hand like he used to, if he ever needed to That's true in the short term, but let's be real, tilling soil isn't likely to become a lost art. I mean, we use big machines right now but here we are talking about using a hoe. If you remove the context of LLMs from the discussion, it reads like you're arguing that te…

> If you remove the context of LLMs from the discussion, it reads like you're arguing that technological progress in general is bad because people would eventually struggle to live without it.

I'm arguing that there are always tradeoffs and we often do not fully understand the tradeoffs we are making or the consequences of those tradeoffs 10, 50, 100 years down the road

When we moved from more physical jobs to desk jobs many of us became sedentary and overweight. Now we are in an "obesity crisis". There's multiple factors to that, it's not just being in desk jobs, but being sedentary is a big factor.

What tradeoffs are we making with AI that we won't fully understand until much further along this road?

Also, what is in it for me or other working class people? We take jobs that have us driving machines, we are "more productive" but do we get paid more? Do we have more free time? Do we get any benefit from this? Maybe a fraction. Most of the benefit is reaped by employers and shareholders

Maybe it would be better if instead of hoeing for 8 hours the farmhand could drive the tractor for 2 hours, make the same money and have 6 more free hours per day?

But what really happens is that the farm buys a tractor, fires 100 of the farmhands coworkers, the has the remaining farmhand drive the tractor for 8 hours, replacing the productivity to very little benefit to himself

Now the other farmhands are unemployed and broke, he's still working just as much and not gaining any extra from it

The only one who benefits are the owners

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#147

Post by vertigolimbo »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #12

OK. (I mean, it was an interesting and relevant question.) The other, related question is, are human coders with an LLM better than human coders without an LLM, and by how much? (habnds made the same point, just before I did.)

Here’s the answer for you. Tldr; 15% performance increase, in some cases up to 40% increase, in the others 5% decrease. It all depends.

Source: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/exp...

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#148

Post by bgwalter »

nialse wrote: post #128
bgwalter wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ahh, the “don’t disturb the status quo” argument. See, we are all working on our replacement, newer versions, products, services and knowledge always make the older obsolete. It is wise to work on your replacement, and even wiser to be in charge of and operate the replacement.

No, nothing fundamentally new is created. Programmers have always been obsessed with "new" tooling and processes to distract from that fact.

"AI" is the latest iteration of snake oil that is foisted upon us by management. The problem is not "AI" per se, but the amount of of friction and productivity loss that comes with it.

Most of the productivity loss comes from being forced to engage with it and push back against that nonsense. One has to learn the hype language, debunk it, etc.

Why do you think IT has gotten better? Amazon had a better and faster website with far better search and products 20 years ago. No amount of "AI" will fix that.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#149

Post by nprateem »

nahbruheem wrote: post #130
marcosdumay wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why state the same arguments everybody has been repeating for ages? LLMs can only give you code that somebody has wrote before. This is inherent. This is useful for a bunch of stuff, but that bunch won't change if OpenAI decides to spend the GDP of Germany training one instead of Costa Rica.

Generating unseen code is not hard. Set rules on what’s valid, which most languages already do; omit generation of known code; generate everything else The computer does the work, programmers don’t have to think it up. A typed language example to explain; generate valid func sigs func f(int1, int2) return int{} If that’s our only func sig in our starting set then it makes it obvious Well relative to our tiny starter…

I think we're hoping for more than the 'infinite monkeys bashing out semantically correct code' approach.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#150

Post by qsort »

kelseydh wrote: post #137
gerad wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unrelated to the broader discussion, but that's an artifact of the time control. Humans add nothing to Stockfish in a 90+30 game, but correspondence chess, for instance, is played with modern engines and still has competitive interest.
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