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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#301

Post by bandoti »

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…

My take is that AI is very one-dimensional (within its many dimensions). For instance, I might close my eyes and imagine an image of a tree structure, or a hash table, or a list-of-trees, or whatever else; then I might imagine grabbing and moving the pieces around, expanding or compressing them like a magician; my brain connects sight and sound, or texture, to an algorithm. However people think about problems is grounded in how we perceive the world in its infinite complexity.

Another example: saying out loud the colors red, blue, yellow, purple, orange, green—each color creates a feeling that goes beyond its physical properties into the emotions and experiences. AI image-generation might know the binary arrangement of an RGBA image but actually, it has NO IDEA what it is to experience colour. No idea how to use the experience of colour to teach a peer of an algorithm. It regurgitates a binary representation.

At some point we’ll get there though—no doubt. It would be foolish to say never! For those who want to get there before everyone else probably should focus on the organoids—because most powerful things come from some Faustian monstrosity.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#302

Post by amelius »

cortesoft wrote: post #58
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…

Currently, I find AI to be a really good autocomplete

It's also quite good at formulating regular expressions based on one or two example strings.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#303

Post by golergka »

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…

Lawyers say those things and then one law firm after another is frantically looking for a contractor to overpay them to install local RAG and chatbot combo.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#304

Post by suddenlybananas »

JeremyNT wrote: post #289
realusername wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You just said they worked one comment ago and now you agree that they don't?

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#305

Post by ksenzee »

JeremyNT wrote: post #289
realusername wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is it inevitable when they are running out of text to train on and running out of funding at the same time?

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#306

Post by archagon »

Fernicia wrote: post #135
elzbardico wrote: post #129

I use LLMs a lot, and call me arrogant, but every time I see a developer saying that LLMs will substitute them, I think they are probably shitty developers.

If it automates 1/5th of your work, then what's unreasonable about thinking that your team could be 4 developers instead of 5?

This just feels like another form of the mythical man month argument.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#307

Post by mywittyname »

gherkinnn wrote: post #125
wanderingstan wrote: post #7

“Better” is always task-dependent. LLMs are already far better than me (and most devs I’d imagine) at rote things like getting CSS syntax right for a desired effect, or remembering the right way to invoke a popular library (e.g. fetch) These little side quests used to eat a lot of my time and I’m happy to have a tool that can do these almost instantly.

I have found it to be good at things I am not very strong at (SQL) but terrible at the things I know well (CSS). Telling, isn't it?

Ironically, I find it strong at things I don't know very well (CSS), but terrible at things I know well (SQL).

This is probably really just a way of saying, it's better at simple tasks rather than complex ones. I can eventually get Copilot to write SQL that's complex and accurate, but I don't find it faster or more effective than writing it myself.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#308

Post by johnnyanmac »

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 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?

For me, it's less "conversation to be skipped" and more about "can we even get to 2 years from now"? There's so much insability right now that it's hard to say what anything will look like in 6 months. "

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#309

Post by Bukhmanizer »

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

> llms nor those juniors for such an important work.

Yeah we shouldn’t and I limit my usage to stuff that is easily verifiable.

But there’s no guardrails on this stuff, and one thing that’s not well considered is how these things which make us more powerful and productive can be destructive in the hands of well intentioned people.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#310

Post by eddd-ddde »

bandoti wrote: post #301
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…

My take is that AI is very one-dimensional (within its many dimensions). For instance, I might close my eyes and imagine an image of a tree structure, or a hash table, or a list-of-trees, or whatever else; then I might imagine grabbing and moving the pieces around, expanding or compressing them like a magician; my brain connects sight and sound, or texture, to an algorithm. However people think about problems is grou…

This is really funny to read as someone who CANNOT imagine anything more complex than the most simple shape like a circle.

Do you actually see a tree with nodes that you can rearrange and have the nodes retain their contents and such?

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