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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#281

Post by parliament32 »

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…

I'd like to agree with you and remain optimistic, but so much tech has promised the moon and stagnated into oblivion that I just don't have any optimism left to give. I don't know if you're old enough, but remember when speech-to-text was the next big thing? DragonSpeak was released in 1997, everyone was losing their minds about dictating letters/documents in MS Word, and we were promised that THIS would be the key interface for computing evermore. And.. 27 years later, talking to the latest Siri, it makes just as many mistakes as it did back then. In messenger applications people are sending literal voice notes -- audio clips -- back and forth because dictation is so unreliable. And audio clips are possibly the worst interface for communication ever (no searching, etc).

Remember how blockchain was going to change the world? Web3? IoT? Etc etc.

I've been through enough of these cycles to understand that, while the AI gimmick is cool and all, we're probably at the local maximum. The reliability won't improve much from here (hallucinations etc), while the costs to run it will stay high. The final tombstone will be when the AI companies stop running at a loss and actually charge for the massive costs associated with running these models.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#282

Post by lexandstuff »

Retric wrote: post #76
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".

Progress sure, but the rate the’ve improved hasn’t been particularly fast recently . Programming has become vastly more efficient in terms of programmer effort over decades, but making some aspects of the job more efficient just means all your effort it spent on what didn’t improve.

People seem to have forgotten how good the 2023 GPT-4 really was at coding tasks.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#283

Post by chucksmash »

foxyv wrote: post #69
marcosdumay wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a damning assertive duck, completely out of proportion to its competence. I've seen enough people led astray by talking to it.

Same here. When I'm teaching coding I've noticed that LLMs will confuse the heck out of students. They will accept what it suggests without realizing that it is suggesting nonsense.

Tbf, there's a phase of learning to code where everything is pretty much an incantation you learn because someone told you "just trust me." You encounter "here's how to make the computer print text in Python" before you would ever discuss strings or defining and invoking functions, for instance. To get your start you kind of have to just accept some stuff uncritically.

It's hard to remember what it was like to be in that phase. Once simple things like using variables are second nature, it's difficult to put yourself back into the shoes of someone who doesn't understand the use of a variable yet.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#285

Post by sho_hn »

marcosdumay wrote: post #127
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.

Most of the times, people are led astray by following average advice on exceptional circumstances. People with a minimum amount of expertise stop asking for advice for average circumstances very quickly.

This is right on the money. I use LLMs when I am reasonably confident the problem I am asking it is well-represented in the training data set and well within its capabilities (this has increased over time).

This means I use it as a typing accelerator when I already know what I want most of the time, not for advice.

As an exploratory tool sometimes, when I am sure others have solved a problem frequently, to have it regurgitate the average solution back at me and take a look. In those situations I never accept the diff as-is and do the integration manually though, to make sure my brain still learns along and I still add the solution to my own mental toolbox.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#286

Post by bitpush »

am17an wrote: post #67

All the world's smartest minds are racing towards replacing themselves. As programmers, we should take note and see where the wind is blowing. At least don't discard the possibility and rather be prepared for the future. Not to sound like a tin-foil hat but odds of achieving something like this increase by the day. In the long term (post AGI), the only safe white-collar jobs would be those built on data which is not…

> All the world's smartest minds are racing towards replacing themselves

Isnt every little script, every little automation us programmers do in the same spirit? "I dont like doing this, so I'm going to automate it, so that I can focus on other work".

Sure, we're racing towards replacing ourselves, but there would be (and will be) other more interesting work for us to do when we're free to do that. Perhaps, all of us will finally have time to learn surfing, or garden, or something. Some might still write code themselves by hand, just like how some folks like making bread .. but making bread by hand is not how you feed a civilization - even if hundreds of bakers were put out of business.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#287

Post by kweingar »

bbarn wrote: post #220
janalsncm wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well said. Using code assistance is going to be table stakes moving forward, not something that can replace people. It’s not like competitors can’t also purchase AI subscriptions.

Honestly, if you're not doing it now, you're behind. The sheer amount of time savings using it smartly can give you to allow you to focus on the parts that actually matter is massive.

If progress continues at the rate that AI boosters expect, then soon you won't have to use them smartly to get value (all existing workflows will churn and be replaced by newer, smarter workflows within months), and everybody who is behind will immediately catch up the moment they start to use the tool.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#288

Post by nialse »

palmotea wrote: post #244
nialse wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 resta…

Being ahead of the curve is a recipe for not being left behind. There is no better time for action than now. And regarding the competition from peers, the key is likely differentiation. As it always has been.

Hardship or not, restarting from the bottom of the ladder or not, betting on status quo is a loosing game at the moment. Software development is being disrupted, I would expect developers to produce 2-4x more now than two years ago. However, that is the pure dev work. The architecture, engineering, requirements, specification etc parts will likely see another trajectory. Much due to the raise of automation in dev and other parts of the company. The flip side is that the raise of non-dev automation is coming, with the possibility of automating other tasks, in turn making engineers (maybe not devs though) vital to the companies process change.

Another, semi related, thought is that software development has automated away millions of jobs and it’s just developers time to be on the other end of the stick.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#289

Post by JeremyNT »

realusername wrote: post #256
JeremyNT wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm in this camp... today.

But there's going to be an inflection point - soon - as things continue to improve. The industry is going to change rapidly.

Now is the time to either get ready for that - by being ahead of the curve, at least by being familiar with the tooling - or switch careers and cede your job to somebody who will play ball.

I don't like any of this, but I see it as inevitable.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#290

Post by bitpush »

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?

Humans are also almost always operating on patterns. This is why "experience" matters a lot.

Very few people are doing truly cutting edge stuff - we call them visionaries. But most of the time, we're just merely doing what's expected

And yes, that includes this comment. This wasnt creative or an original thought at all. I'm sure hundreds of people have had similar thought, and I'm probably parroting someone else's idea here. So if I can do it, why cant LLM?

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