Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Human coders are still better than LLMs

antirez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 762 posts

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#181

Post by schwartzworld »

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 like having a junior developer work under me who knows APIs inside and out, but has no common sense about architecture. I like that I delegate tasks to them so that my brain can be free for other problems, but it makes my job much more review heavy than before. I put every PR through 3-4 review cycles before even asking my team for a review.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#182

Post by zamalek »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #99
prophesi wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The hype cycle is real and setting expectations that get higher with _the less you know about how they work_. I imagine on HN, the expectations we're talking about are from fellow software developers who at least have a general idea on how LLM's work and their limitations.

Right below this is a comment > you will almost certainly be replaced by an llm in the next few years So... Maybe not. I agree that Hacker News does have a generally higher quality of contributors than many places on the internet, but it absolutely is not a universal for HNers. There are still quite a few posters here that have really bought into the hype for whatever reason

> hype for whatever reason

"I need others to buy into LLMs in order for my buy-in to make sense," i.e. network effects.[1]

> Most dot-com companies incurred net operating losses as they spent heavily on advertising and promotions to harness network effects to build market share or mind share as fast as possible, using the mottos "get big fast" and "get large or get lost". These companies offered their services or products for free or at a discount with the expectation that they could build enough brand awareness to charge profitable rates for their services in the future.

You don't have to go very far up in terms of higher order thinking to understand what's going on here. For example, think about Satya's motivations for disclosing Microsoft writing 30% of their code using LLMs. If this really was the case, wouldn't Microsoft prefer to keep this competitive advantage secret? No: Microsoft and all the LLM players need to drive hype, and thus mind share, in the hope that they become profitable at some point.

If "please" and "thank you" are incurring huge costs[2], how much is that LLM subscription actually going to cost consumers when the angel investors come knocking, and are consumers going to be willing to pay that?

I think a more valuable skill might be learning how to make do with local LLMs because who knows how many of these competitors will still be around in a few years.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble#Spending_tenden... [2]: https://futurism.com/altman-please-thanks-chatgpt

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#183

Post by foobar83 »

sixQuarks wrote: post #22
vouaobrasil wrote: post #3

The question is, for how long?

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.

Nobody knows what the future holds, including you.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#184

Post by xhevahir »

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…

This attitude is depressingly common in lots of professional, white-collar industries I'm afraid. I just came from the /r/law subreddit and was amazed at the kneejerk dismissal there of Dario Amodei's recent comments about legal work, and of those commenters who took them seriously. It's probably as much a coping mechanism as it is complacency, but, either way, it bodes very poorly for our future efforts at mitigating whatever economic and social upheaval is coming.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#185

Post by 91bananas »

allturtles wrote: post #161
Jolter wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not all engineering is creating models though, sometimes there are simpler problems to solve.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#186

Post by sunrunner »

cortesoft wrote: post #58
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…

Currently, I find AI to be a really good autocomplete

Earlier this week ChatGPT found (self-conscious as I am of the personification of this phrasing) a place where I'd accidentally overloaded a member function by unintentionally giving it the name of something from a parent class, preventing the parent class function from ever being run and causing .

After walking through a short debugging session where it tried the four things I'd already thought of and eventually suggested (assertively but correctly) where the problem was, I had a resolution to my problem.

There are a lot of questions I have around how this kind of mistake could simply just be avoided at a language level (parent function accessibility modifiers, enforcing an override specifier, not supporting this kind of mistake-prone structure in the first place, and so on...). But it did get me unstuck, so in this instance it was a decent, if probabilistic, rubber duck.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#187

Post by LandR »

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.

What do you mean? Chess engines are incredibly far ahead of humans right now.

Even a moderately powered machine running stockfish will destroy human super gms.

Sorry, after reading replies to this post i think I've misunderstood what you meant :)

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#188

Post by seadan83 »

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.

> It's like chess. Humans are better for now, they won't be forever

This is not an obviously true statement. There needs to be proof that there are no limiting factors that are computationally impossible to overcome. It's like watching a growing child, grow from 3 feet to 4 feet, and then saying "soon, this child will be the tallest person alive."

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#189

Post by seadan83 »

LandR wrote: post #187
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.

What do you mean? Chess engines are incredibly far ahead of humans right now. Even a moderately powered machine running stockfish will destroy human super gms. Sorry, after reading replies to this post i think I've misunderstood what you meant :)

The phrasing was perhaps a bit odd. For a while, humans were better at Chess, until they weren't. OP is hypothesizing it will be a similar situation for programming. To boot, it was hard to believe for a long time that computers would ever be better than a humans at chess.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#190

Post by hollerith »

LandR wrote: post #187
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.

What do you mean? Chess engines are incredibly far ahead of humans right now. Even a moderately powered machine running stockfish will destroy human super gms. Sorry, after reading replies to this post i think I've misunderstood what you meant :)

I think he knows that. There was a period from the early 1950s (when people first started writing chess-playing software) to 1997 when humans were better at chess than computers were, and I think he is saying that we are still in the analogous period for the skill of programming.

But he should've know that people would jump at the opportunity to contradict him and should've written his comment so as not to admit such an easily-contradictable interpretation.

Post reply on HN