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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#201

Post by danielbln »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #110
sofal wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't acquire skills and apply them just to be able to apply them. I use them to solve problems and create things. My learned skills for processing audio are for the purpose of getting the audio sounding the way I want it to sound. If an AI can do that for me instead, that's amazing and frees up my time to do other things or do a lot more different audio things. None of this is scary to me or impacts my personal di…

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…

You can still do those tasks, but the market value will drop. Automatable work should always be automated, because we best focus on things that can't be automated yet and those gain more market value. Supply and demand and all that. I do hope we have a collective plan about what we do when everything is automated at some point. Some form of UBI?

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#202

Post by dttze »

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…

[flagged]

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#203

Post by empath75 »

bgwalter wrote: post #170
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 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.

Funnily enough, I had a 3 or 4 hour chat with some co workers yesterday about an LLM related project and my feeling about LLM's is that it's actually opening up a lot of fun and interesting software engineering challenges if you want to figure out how to automate the usage of LLM's.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#204

Post by stonemetal12 »

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…

>I think the difference is how much of the job the tool can take over.

I think it is about how utilitarian the output is. For food no one cares how the sausage is made. For a painting the story behind it is more important than the picture itself. All of Picasso's paintings are famous because they were painted by Picasso. Picasso style painting by Bill? Suddenly it isn't museum worthy anymore.

No one cares about the story or people behind Word, they just want to edit documents. The Demo scene probably has a good shot at being on the side of art.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#205

Post by AstroBen »

devjab wrote: post #101
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…

LLM's do no software engineering at all, and that can be fine. Because you don't actually need software engineering to create successful programs. Some applications will not even need software engineering for their entire life cycles because nobody is really paying attention to efficiency in the ocean of poor cloud management anyway. I actually imagine it's the opposite of what you say here. I think technically incli…

That's the thing too right.. the vast majority of software out there barely needs to scale or be super efficient

It does need to be reliable, though. LLMs have proven very bad at that

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#206

Post by 65 »

AI is good for people who have given up, who don't give a shit about anything anymore.

You know, those who don't care about learning and solving problems, gaining real experience they can use to solve problems even faster in the future, faster than any AI slop.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#207

Post by bbarn »

traceroute66 wrote: post #163
klntsky wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 answ…

They will also not be offended or harbor ill will when you completely reject their "pull request" and rephrase the requirements.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#208

Post by vidarh »

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 is inherent.

This is trivial to prove to be false.

Invent a programming language that does not exist. Describe its semantics to an LLM. Ask it to write a program to solve a problem in that language. It will not always work, but it will work often enough to demonstrate that they are very much capable of writing code that has never been written before.

The first time I tried this was with GPT3.5, and I had it write code in an unholy combination of Ruby and INTERCAL, and it had no problems doing that.

Similarly giving it a grammar of a hypothetical language, and asking it to generate valid text in a language that has not existed before also works reasonably well.

This notion that LLMs only spit out things that has been written before might have been reasonable to believe a few years ago, but it hasn't been a reasonable position to hold for a long time at this point.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#209

Post by californical »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #146
hatefulmoron wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 j…

I do think you’re missing something, though.

In a healthy competitive market (like most of the history of the US, maybe not the last 30-40 years), if all of the farms do that, it drives down the cost of the food. The reduction in labor necessary to produce the food causes competition and brings down the cost to produce the food.

That still doesn’t directly benefit the farmhands. But if it happens gradually throughout the entire economy, it creates abundance that benefits everybody. The farmhand doesn’t benefit from their own increase in productivity, but they benefit from everyone else’s.

And those unemployed farmhands likely don’t stay unemployed - maybe farms are able to expand and grow more, now that there is more labor available. Maybe they even go into food processing. It’s not obvious at the time, though.

In tech, we currently have like 6-10 mega companies, and a bunch of little ones. I think creating an environment that allows many more medium-sized companies and allowing them to compete heavily will ease away any risk of job loss. Same applies to a bunch of fields other than tech. The US companies are far too consolidated.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#210

Post by BlackSwanMan »

asdff wrote: post #175
npteljes wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carteling doesn't work bottom-up. When changes begin (like this one with AI), one of the things an individual can do is to change course as fast as they can. There are other strategies as well, not evolving is also one, but some strategies yield better results than others. Not keeping up just worsens the chances, I have found.

It does when it is called unionizing, however for some reason software developers have a mental block towards the concept.

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