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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#331

Post by XorNot »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #296
all2 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My typical approach is prompt, be disgusted by the output, tinker a little on my own, prompt again -- but more specific, be disgusted again by the output, tinker a littler more, etc. Eventually I land on a solution to my problem that isn't disgusting and isn't AI slop. Having a sounding board, even a bad one, forces me to order my thinking and understand the problem space more deeply.

Why not just write the code at that point instead of cajoling an AI to do it.

This is the part I don't get about vibe coding: I've written specification documents before. They frequently are longer and denser then the code required to implement them.

Typing longer and longer prompts to LLMs to not get what I want seems like a worse experience.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#332

Post by tharkun__ »

chucksmash wrote: post #283
foxyv wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fair enough on 'cutting the learning tree' at some points i.e. ignoring that you don't understand yet why something works/does what it does. We (should) keep doing that later on in life as well.

But unless you teach a kid that's never done any math where `x` was a thing to program, what's so hard about understanding the concept of a variable in programming?

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#333

Post by wijwp »

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…

> Not to sound like a tin-foil hat but odds of achieving something like this increase by the day.

Where do you get this? The limitations of LLMs are becoming more clear by the day. Improvements are slowing down. Major improvements come from integrations, not major model improvements.

AGI likely can't be achieved with LLMs. That wasn't as clear a couple years ago.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#334

Post by mbrameld »

p1necone wrote: post #267
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…

> the duck can occasionally disagree This has not been my experience. LLMs have definitely been helpful, but generally they either give you the right answer or invent something plausible sounding but incorrect. If I tell it what I'm doing I always get breathless praise, never "that doesn't sound right, try this instead."

Ask it. Instead of just telling it what you're doing and expecting it to criticize that, ask it directly for criticism. Even better, tell it what you're doing, then tell it to ask you questions about what you're doing until it knows enough to recommend a better approach.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#335

Post by lupire »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #296
all2 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My typical approach is prompt, be disgusted by the output, tinker a little on my own, prompt again -- but more specific, be disgusted again by the output, tinker a littler more, etc. Eventually I land on a solution to my problem that isn't disgusting and isn't AI slop. Having a sounding board, even a bad one, forces me to order my thinking and understand the problem space more deeply.

Why not just write the code at that point instead of cajoling an AI to do it.

Because saving hours of time is nice.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#336

Post by bachmeier »

noslenwerdna wrote: post #325
bachmeier wrote: post #319

I suspect humans will always be critical to programming. Improved technology won't matter if the economics isn't there. LLMs are great as assistants. Just today, Copilot told me it's there to do the "tedious and repetitive" parts so I can focus my energy on the "interesting" parts. That's great. They do the things every programmer hates having to do. I'm more productive in the best possible way. But ask it to do too…

Sure, it's just that the era of super high paying programming jobs may be over. And also, manufacturing jobs have greatly changed. And the effect is not even, I imagine. Some types of manufacturing jobs are just gone.

> the era of super high paying programming jobs may be over.

Probably, but I'm not sure that had much to do with AI.

> Some types of manufacturing jobs are just gone

The manufacturing work that was automated is not exactly the kind of work people want to do. I briefly did some of that work. Briefly because it was truly awful.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#337

Post by bandoti »

eddd-ddde wrote: post #310
bandoti wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Haha—yeah, for me the approach is always visual. I have to draw a picture to really wrap my brain around things! Other people I’d imagine have their own human, non-AI way to organize a problem space. :)

I have been drawing all my life and studied traditional animation though, so it’s probably a little bit of nature and nurture.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#338

Post by jdiff »

xandrius wrote: post #252
bgwalter wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would we not? If they were so effective, their effectiveness would be apparent, inarguable, and those making use of it would advertise it as a demonstration of just that. Even if there were some sort of social stigma against it, AI has enough proponents to produce copious amounts of counterarguments through evidence all on their own.

Instead, we have a tiny handful of one-off events that were laboriously tuned and tweaked and massaged over extended periods of time, and a flood of slop in the form of broken patches, bloated and misleading issues, and nonsense bug bounty attempts.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#339

Post by lupire »

mbrameld wrote: post #334
p1necone wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the duck can occasionally disagree This has not been my experience. LLMs have definitely been helpful, but generally they either give you the right answer or invent something plausible sounding but incorrect. If I tell it what I'm doing I always get breathless praise, never "that doesn't sound right, try this instead."

Ask it. Instead of just telling it what you're doing and expecting it to criticize that, ask it directly for criticism. Even better, tell it what you're doing, then tell it to ask you questions about what you're doing until it knows enough to recommend a better approach.

This is key. Humans each have a personality and some sense of mood. When you ask for help, you choose ask and that person can sense your situation. LLM has every personality and doesn't know your situation. You have to tell it which personality to use and what your situation is.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#340

Post by lupire »

Epa095 wrote: post #131
apwell23 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how much of coding is really never done before? A lot because we use libraries for 'done frequently before' code. i don't generate a database driver for my webapp with llm.

We use libraries for SOME of the 'done frequently' code. But how much of enterprise programming is 'get some data from a database, show it on a Web page (or gui), store some data in the database', with variants? It makes sense that we have libraries for abstraction away some common things. But it also makes sense that we can't abstract away everything we do multiple times, because at some point it just becomes so abs…

Cue Haskell gang "Design patterns are workarounds for weaknesses in your language".
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