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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

#151

Post by ch4s3 »

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…

It seems like LLMs made really big strides for a while but don't seem to be getting better recently, and in some ways recent models feel a bit worse. I'm seeing some good results generating test code, and some really bad results when people go to far with LLM use on new feature work. Base on what I've seen it seems like spinning up new projects and very basic features for web apps works really well, but that doesn't seem to generalize to refactoring or adding new features to big/old code bases.

I've seen Claude and ChatGPT happily hallucinate whole APIs for D3 on multiple occasions, which should be really well represented in the training sets.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#152

Post by dbacar »

nthingtohide wrote: post #119
dbacar wrote: post #109

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.

Do you want to measure antirez and AI on a spider diagram, generally used to evaluate employee? Are you ignoring why society opted for division of work and specialization?

They are not investing billions on it so a high schooler can do his term paper on it, is is already much more than a generalist. It might be like a very good sidekick for now, but that is not the plan.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#153

Post by cushychicken »

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…

ChatGPT-4o is scary good at writing VHDL.

Using it to prototype some low level controllers today, as a matter of fact!

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#154

Post by vouaobrasil »

sofal wrote: post #133
vouaobrasil wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

My argument really had nothing to do with you and your hobby. It was that AI is signficantly modifying society so that it will be hard for people to do what they like to make money, because AI can do it.

If AI can solve some boring tasks for you, that's fine but the world doesn't revolve around your job or your hobby. I'm talking about a large mass of people who enjoy doing different things, who once were able to do those things to make a living, but are finding it harder to do so because tech companies have found a way to do all those things because they could leverage their economies of scale and massive resource pools to automate all that.

You are in a priveleged position, no doubt about it. But plenty of people are talented and skilled at doing a certain sort of creative work and the main thrust of their work can be automated. It's not like your cushy job where you can just automate a part of it and just become more efficient, but rather it's that people just won't have a job.

It's amazing how you can be so myopic to only think of yourself and what AI can do for you when you are probably in the top 5% of the world, rather than give one minute to think of what AI is doing to others who don't have the luxuries you have.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#155

Post by ch4s3 »

gherkinnn wrote: post #125
wanderingstan wrote: post #7

“Better” is always task-dependent. LLMs are already far better than me (and most devs I’d imagine) at rote things like getting CSS syntax right for a desired effect, or remembering the right way to invoke a popular library (e.g. fetch) These little side quests used to eat a lot of my time and I’m happy to have a tool that can do these almost instantly.

I have found it to be good at things I am not very strong at (SQL) but terrible at the things I know well (CSS). Telling, isn't it?

I kind of agree. It feels like they're generally a superior form of copying and pasting fro stack overflow where the machine has automated the searching, copying, pasting, and fiddling with variable names. It be just as useful or dangerous as Google -> Copy -> Paste ever was, but faster.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#156

Post by danielbln »

jaccola wrote: post #31
wanderingstan wrote: post #7

“Better” is always task-dependent. LLMs are already far better than me (and most devs I’d imagine) at rote things like getting CSS syntax right for a desired effect, or remembering the right way to invoke a popular library (e.g. fetch) These little side quests used to eat a lot of my time and I’m happy to have a tool that can do these almost instantly.

I've found LLMs particularly bad for anything beyond basic styling since the effects can be quite hard to describe and/or don't have a universal description. Also, there are often times multiple ways to achieve a certain style and they all work fine until you want a particular tweak, in which case only one will work and the LLM usually gets stuck in one of the ones that does not work.

Multi modal LLMs to the rescue. Throw a screenshot or mockup in there and tell the LLM "there, like this". Gemini can do the same with videos.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#157

Post by sixQuarks »

sofal wrote: post #64
sixQuarks wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! We’ve been seeing more and more posts like this, saying how AI will never take developer jobs or will never be as good as coders. I think it’s some sort of coping mechanism. These posts are gonna look really silly in the not too distant future. I get it, spending countless hours honing your craft and knowing that AI will soon make almost everything you learned useless is very scary.

I'm constantly disappointed by how little I'm able to delegate to AI after the unending promises that I'll be able to delegate nearly 100% of what I do now "in the not too distant future". It's tired impatience and merited skepticism that you mistake for fear and coping. Just because people aren't on the hype train with you doesn't mean they're afraid.

Yes. I know what you’re referring to, but you can’t ignore the pace of improvement. I think within 2-3 years we will have AI coding that can do anything a senior level coder can do.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#158

Post by sigmoid10 »

klntsky wrote: post #72
marcosdumay wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a damning assertive duck, completely out of proportion to its competence. I've seen enough people led astray by talking to it.

I would argue that they are never led astray by chatting, but rather by accepting the projection of their own prompt passed through the model as some kind of truth. When talking with reasonable people, they have an intuition of what you want even if you don't say it, because there is a lot of non-verbal context. LLMs lack the ability to understand the person, but behave as if they had it.

It's mostly a question of experience. I've been writing software long enough that when I give chat models some code and a problem, I can immediately tell if they understood it or if they got hooked on something unrelated. But junior devs will have a hell of a hard time, because the raw code quality that LLMs generate is usually top notch, even if the functionality is completely off.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#159

Post by [deleted] »

marcosdumay wrote: post #65
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".

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.

[deleted]

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#160

Post by ortusdux »

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 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 know how to answer that question.

I still think about Tom Scott's 'where are we on the AI curve' video from a few years back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPhJbKBuNnA

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