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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#191

Post by AstroBen »

Better than LLMs.. for now. I'm endlessly critical of the AI hype but the truth here is that no-one has any idea what's going to happen 3-10 years from now. It's a very quickly changing space with a lot of really smart people working on it. We've seen the potential

Maybe LLMs completely trivialize all coding. The potential for this is there

Maybe progress slows to a snails pace, the VC money runs out and companies massively raise prices making it not worth it to use

No one knows. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. Maybe save some money just in case

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#192

Post by acquisitionsilk »

It is quite heartening to see so many people care about "good code". I fear it will make no difference.

The problem is that the software world got eaten up by the business world many years ago. I'm not sure at what point exactly, or if the writing was already on the wall when Bill Gates' wrote his open letter to hobbyists in 1976.

The question is whether shareholders and managers will accept less good code. I don't see how it would be logical to expect anything else, as long as profit lines go up why would they care.

Short of some sort of cultural pushback from developers or users, we're cooked, as the youth say.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#193

Post by LandR »

hollerith wrote: post #190
LandR wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, amended my post. I understand what he was saying now. Thanks.

Wasn't trying to just be contradictory or arsey

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#194

Post by JackSlateur »

acquisitionsilk wrote: post #192

It is quite heartening to see so many people care about "good code". I fear it will make no difference. The problem is that the software world got eaten up by the business world many years ago. I'm not sure at what point exactly, or if the writing was already on the wall when Bill Gates' wrote his open letter to hobbyists in 1976. The question is whether shareholders and managers will accept less good code. I don't s…

Code is meant to power your business

Bad code leads to bad business

This makes me think of hosting departement; You know, which people who are using vmware, physical firewalls, dpi proxies and whatnot;

On the other edge, you have public cloud providers, which are using qemu, netfilter, dumb networking devices and stuff

Who got eaten by whom, nobody could have guessed ..

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#195

Post by JoshCole »

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.

> LLMs can only give you code that somebody has wrote before.

This premise is false. It is fundamentally equivalent to the claim that a language model being trained on a dataset: ["ABA", "ABB"] would be unable to generate, given input "B" the string "BAB" or "BAA".

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#196

Post by suddenlybananas »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #79
sofal wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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,…

What do you mean that AI can do audio editing? I don't think all sound engineers have been replaced.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#197

Post by empath75 »

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…

Just the exercise of putting my question in a way that the LLM could even theoretically provide a useful response is enough for me to figure out how to solve the problem a good percentage of the time.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#198

Post by JeremyNT »

bgwalter wrote: post #114
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…

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

I don't think that this should be downvoted because it raises a really important issue.

I hate AI code assistants, not because they suck, but because they work. The writing is on the wall.

If we aren't working on our own replacements, we'll be the ones replaced by somebody else's vibe code, and we have no labor unions that could plausibly fight back against this.

So become a Vibe Coder and keep working, or take the "prudent" approach you mention - and become unemployed.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#199

Post by JackSlateur »

pupppet wrote: post #23

If an LLM just finds patterns, is it even possible for an LLM to be GOOD at anything? Doesn't that mean at best it will be average?

Yes, IA is basically a random machine aiming for average outcome

IA is neat for average people, to produce average code, for average compagnies

In a competitive world, using IA is a death sentence;

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#200

Post by empath75 »

ch4s3 wrote: post #151
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…

the LLM's themselves are making marginal gains, but the tools for using LLMs productively are getting so much better.
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