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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#251

Post by xandrius »

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…

Keep using it and you'll see. Also that depends on the model and prompting.

My approach is to describe the task in great detail, which also helps me completing my own understanding of the problem, in case I hadn't considered an edge case or how to handle something specific. The more you do that the closer the result you get is to your own personal taste, experience and design.

Of course you're trading writing code vs writing a prompt but it's common to make architectural docs before making a sizeable feature, now you can feed that to the LLM instead of just having it be there.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#252

Post by xandrius »

bgwalter wrote: post #237
garciasn wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the response to most new technologies; folks simply don't want to accept the future before the ramifications truly hit. If technology folk cannot see the INCREDIBLE LEAP FORWARD made by LLMs since ChatGPT came on the market, they're not seeing the forest through the trees because their heads are buried in the sand. LLMs for coding are not even close to imperfect, yet, but the saturation curves are not flatten…

Adapt to your manager at bigcorp who is hyping the tech because it gives him something to do? No open source project is using the useless LLM shackles.

As if you'd know if they did.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#253

Post by xandrius »

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.

Nobody is preventing people writing in Assembly, even though we have more advanced language.

You could even go back to punch cards if you want to. Literally nobody forcing you to not use it for your own fun.

But LLMs are a multiplier in many mundane tasks (I'd say about 80+% of software development for businesses), so not using them is like fighting against using a computer because you like writing by hand.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#254

Post by spamizbad »

xhevahir wrote: post #184
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 mitigatin…

I think it's pretty reasonable to take a CEO's - any CEO in any industry - statements with a grain of salt. They are under tremendous pressure to paint the most rosy picture possible of their future. They actually need you to "believe" just as much as their team needs to deliver.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#255

Post by xandrius »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #63
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…

Yea, this is why I dont buy the "all developers will disappear". Will I write a lot less code in 5 years (maybe almost none)? Sure, I already type a lot less now than a year ago. But that is just a small part of the process.

Exactly, also today I can actually believe I could finish a game which might have taken much longer before LLMs, just because now I can be pretty sure I won't get stuck on some feature just because I never done it before.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#256

Post by realusername »

JeremyNT wrote: post #198
bgwalter wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

Personally I used them for a while and then just stopped using them because actually no, unfortunately those assistants don't work. They appear to work at first glance but there's so much babysitting needed that it's just not worth it.

This "vibe coding" seems just another way to say that people spend more time refining the output of these tools over and over again that what they would normally code.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#257

Post by neta1337 »

JeremyNT wrote: post #198
bgwalter wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

I’ll work on fixing the vibe coders mess and make bank. Experience will prove valuable even more than before

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#258

Post by anjc »

Gemini gives instant, adaptive, expert solutions to an esoteric and complex problem, and commenters here are still likening LLMs to junior coders.

Glad to see the author acknowledges their usefulness and limitations so far.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#259

Post by jrochkind1 »

jajko wrote: post #216
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple people I work with who clearly don’t have a good understanding of software engineering. They aren’t bad to work with and are in fact great at collaborating and documenting their work, but don’t seem to have the ability to really trace through code and logically understand how it works. Before LLMs it was mostly fine because they just didn’t do that kind of work. But now it’s like a very subtle chao…

Sounds almost like you definitely shouldnt use llms nor those juniors for such an important work. Is it just me or are we heading into a period of explosion of software done, but also a massive drop of its quality? Not uniformly, just a bit of chaotic spread

Which is frightening, because it's not like our industry is known for producing really high quality code at the starting point before LLM authored code.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#260

Post by johnecheck »

nevertoolate wrote: post #124
hathawsh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that when AI exhibits behavior like that, you can refine the AI or add more AI layers to correct it. For example, you might create a supervisor AI that evaluates when more requirements are needed before continuing to build, and a code review AI that triggers refinements automatically.

Question is, how autonomous decision making works, nobody argues that llm can finish any sentence, but can it push a red button?

Of course it can push a red button. Trivially, with MCP.

Setting up a system to make decisions autonomous is technically easy. Ensuring that it makes the right decisions, though, is a far harder task.

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