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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#161

Post by allturtles »

Jolter wrote: post #132
bgwalter wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think it's the wrong analogy. The prompt engineer who uses the AI to make code maps to the poorly-paid, low-skill power loom machine tender. The "engineer" is the person who created the model. But it's also not totally clear to me that we'll need humans for that either, in the near future.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#162

Post by danielbln »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #41
zdragnar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's great if it's for something outside of your primary language. I've used it to good effect in that way myself. However, denying yourself the reflexive memory of having learned those things is a quick way to become wholly dependent upon the tool. You could easily end up with compromised solutions because the tool recommends something you don't understand well enough to know there's a better way to do som…

So here's an analogy. (Yeah, I know, proof by analogy is fraud. But it's going to illustrate the question.) 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." Different analogy: Here's someone trying to learn to paint. They see someone p…

For me the creativity in software engineering doesn't come from coding, that's an implementation detail. It comes from architecture, from thinking about "what do I want to build, how should it behave, how should it look, what or who is it for?" and driving that forward. Bolting it together in code is hoeing, for that vast majority of us. The creative endeavor sits higher up on the abstraction ladder.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#163

Post by traceroute66 »

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.

> When talking with reasonable people

When talking with reasonable people, they will tell you if they don't understand what you're saying.

When talking with reasonable people, they will tell you if they don't know the answer or if they are unsure about their answer.

LLMs do none of that.

They will very happily, and very confidently, spout complete bullshit at you.

It is essentially a lotto draw as to whether the answer is hallucinated, completely wrong, subtly wrong, not ideal, sort of right or correct.

An LLM is a bit like those spin the wheel game shows on TV really.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#165

Post by [deleted] »

apwell23 wrote: post #123
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".

> Perhaps you remember that language models were completely useless at coding some years ago no i don't remember that. They are doing similar things now that they did 3 yrs ago. They were still a decent rubber duck 3 yrs ago.

[deleted]

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#166

Post by danielbln »

skydhash wrote: post #68
dpkirchner wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, however I think we've already gone through this before. Most of us (probably) couldn't tell you exactly how an optimizing compiler picks optimizations or exactly how JavaScript maps to processor instructions, etc -- we hopefully understand enough at one level of abstraction to do our jobs. Maybe LLM driving will be another level of abstraction, when it gets better at (say) architecting projects.

> Most of us (probably) couldn't tell you exactly how an optimizing compiler picks optimizations or exactly how JavaScript maps to processor instructions, That's because other people are making those working well. It's like how you don't care about how the bread is being made because you trust your baker (or the regulations). It's a chain of trust that is easily broken when LLMs are brought in.

Depends, if regulations are the cage that a baker has to work in to produce a product of agreed upon quality, then tests and types and LSPs etc. can be that cage for an LLM.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#167

Post by traceroute66 »

_tom_ wrote: post #51
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…

For me, it's a bit like pair programming. I have someone to discuss ideas with. Someone to review my code and suggest alternative approaches. Some one that uses different feature than I do, so I learn from them.

I guess if you enjoy programming with someone you can never really trust, then yeah, sure, its "a bit like" pairs programming.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#168

Post by drivenextfunc »

marcosdumay wrote: post #56
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 a damning assertive duck, completely out of proportion to its competence. I've seen enough people led astray by talking to it.

Regarding the stubborn and narcissistic personality of LLMs (especially reasoning models), I suspect that attempts to make them jailbreak-resistant might be a factor. To prevent users from gaslighting the LLM, trainers might have inadvertently made the LLMs prone to gaslighting users.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#169

Post by vouaobrasil »

spion wrote: post #143
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 ne…

I think that we can't expect continuous progress either, though. Often in computer science it's more discrete, and unexpected. Computer chess was basically stagnant until one team, even the evolution of species often behaves in a punctuated way rather than as a sum of many small adaptations. I'm much more interested (worried) of what the world will be like in 30 years, rather than in the next 5.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#170

Post by bgwalter »

Jolter wrote: post #132
bgwalter wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I want to be neither. I either want to continue being a software engineer who doesn't need a tricycle for the mind, or move to law or medicine; two professions that have successfully defended themselves against extreme versions of the kind of anxiety, obedience and self hate that is so prevalent among software engineers.
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