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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#241

Post by nialse »

palmotea wrote: post #239
nialse wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to keep in mind: it is not a goal of our society or economic system to provide you with a stable, rewarding job. In fact, the incentives are to take that away from you ASAP. We seem to agree as this is more or less exactly the my point. Striving to keep the status quo is a futile path. Eventually things change. Be ready. The best advice I've ever got work (and maybe even life) wise is to always have altern…

> We seem to agree as this is more or less exactly the my point. Striving to keep the status quo is a futile path. Eventually things change. Be ready. The best advice I've ever got work (and maybe even life) wise is to always have alternatives. If you don't have alternatives, you literally have no choice. Those alternatives are going to be worse for you, because if they weren't, why didn't you switch already? And if…

Alternatives need not be better or worse. Just different. Alternatives need not be doing the same thing somewhere else, it might be seeking out something else to do where you are. It might be selling all your stuff and live on an island in the sun for all I know.

I do concur it is an individualistic strategy, and as you mentioned unionization might have helped. But, then again it might not. Developers are partially unionized where I live, and I'm not so sure it's going to help. It might absorb some of the impact. Let's see in a couple of years.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#242

Post by vouaobrasil »

foobar83 wrote: post #183
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.

Nobody knows what the future holds, including you.

That is true, which is why we should be cautious instead of careless.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#243

Post by schwartzworld »

eslaught wrote: post #238
schwartzworld wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you not completely destroy your concentration when you do this though? I normally build things bottom up so that I understand all the pieces intimately and when I get to the next level of abstraction up, I know exactly how to put them together to achieve what I want. In my (admittedly limited) use of LLMs so far, I've found that they do a great job of writing code, but that code is often off in subtle ways. Bu…

I use a few strategies, but it's mostly the same as if I was mentoring a junior. A lot of my job already involved breaking up big features into small tickets. If the tasks are small enough, juniors and LLMs have an easier time implementing things and I have an easier time reviewing. If there's something I'm really unfamiliar with, it should be in a dedicated function backed by enough tests that my understanding of the implementation isn't required. In fact, LLMs do great with TDD!

> At least with humans I have some basic level of trust, so that even if I don't understand the code at that level, I can scan it and see that it's reasonable.

If you can't scan the code and see that it's reasonable, that's a smell. The task was too big or its implemented the wrong way. You'd feel bad telling a real person to go back and rewrite it a different way but the LLM has no ego to bruise.

I may have a different perspective because I already do a lot of review, but I think using LLMs means you have to do more of it. What's the excuse for merging code that is "off" in any way? The LLM did it? It takes a short time to review your code, give your feedback to the LLM and put up something actually production ready.

> But every piece of LLM generated code I've seen to date hasn't been trustworthy once I put in the effort to really understand it.

That's why your code needs tests. More tests. If you can't test it, it's wrong and needs to be rewritten.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#244

Post by palmotea »

nialse wrote: post #241
palmotea wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We seem to agree as this is more or less exactly the my point. Striving to keep the status quo is a futile path. Eventually things change. Be ready. The best advice I've ever got work (and maybe even life) wise is to always have alternatives. If you don't have alternatives, you literally have no choice. Those alternatives are going to be worse for you, because if they weren't, why didn't you switch already? And if…

Alternatives need not be better or worse. Just different. Alternatives need not be doing the same thing somewhere else, it might be seeking out something else to do where you are. It might be selling all your stuff and live on an island in the sun for all I know. I do concur it is an individualistic strategy, and as you mentioned unionization might have helped. But, then again it might not. Developers are partially u…

> Alternatives need not be better or worse. Just different. Alternatives need [not] be doing the same thing somewhere else, it might be seeking out something else to do where you are.

People have families to feed and lifestyles to maintain, anything that's not equivalent will introduce hardship. And "different" most likely means worse, when it comes to compensation. Even a successful career change usually means restarting at the bottom of the ladder.

And what's that "something else," exactly? You need to consider that may be disrupted at the same time you're planning on seeking it, or fierce competition from your peers makes it unobtainable to you.

Assuming there are alternatives waiting for you when you'll need them is its own kind of complacency.

> It might be selling all your stuff and live on an island in the sun for all I know.

Yeah, people with the "fuck-you" money to do that will probably be fine. Most people don't have that, though.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#245

Post by layer8 »

joshdavham wrote: post #96
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 actually think a fair amount of value from LLM assistants to me is having a reasonably intelligent rubber duck to talk to. I wonder if the term "rubber duck debugging" will still be used much longer into the future.

As long as it remains in the training material, it will be used. ;)

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#246

Post by soerxpso »

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…

> hallucinate whole APIs for D3 on multiple occasions, which should be really well represented in the training sets

With many existing systems, you can pull documentation into context pretty quickly to prevent the hallucination of APIs. In the near future it's obvious how that could be done automatically. I put my engine on the ground, ran it and it didn't even go anywhere; Ford will never beat horses.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#248

Post by layer8 »

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…

Programmers derided programming languages (too inefficient, too inflexible, too dumbing-down) when assembly was still the default. That phenomenon is at the same time entirely to be expected but also says little about the actual qualities of the new technology.
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