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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#361

Post by SchemaLoad »

XorNot wrote: post #326
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.

This was what promptly led me to turning off Jetbrains AI assistant: the multiline completion was incredibly distracting to my chain of thought, particularly when it would suggest things that looked right but weren't. Stopping and parsing the suggestion to realize if it was right or wrong would completely kill my flow.

The inline suggestions feel like that annoying person who always interrupts you with what they think you were going to finish with but rarely ever gets it right.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#362

Post by galaxyLogic »

Coding is not like multiplication. You can teach kids the multiplication table, or you can give them a calculator and both will work. With coding the problem is the "spec" is so much more complicated than just asking what is 5 * 7.

Maybe the way forward would be to invent better "specifiction languages" that are easy enough for humans to use, then let the AI implement the specifciation you come up with.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#363

Post by bdbenton5255 »

The human ability to design computer programs through abstractions and solve creative problems like these is arguably more important than being able to crank out lines of code that perform specific tasks.

The programmer is an architect of logic and computers translate human modes of thought into instructions. These tools can imitate humans and produce code given certain tasks, typically by scraping existing code, but they can't replace that abstract level of human thought to design and build in the same way.

When these models are given greater functionality to not only output code but to build out entire projects given specifications, then the role of the human programmer must evolve.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#364

Post by protocolture »

marcosdumay wrote: post #56
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…

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

I spend a lot of time working shit out to prove the rubber duck wrong and I am not completely sure this is a bad working model.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#365

Post by monocularvision »

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.

That might be the case. Perhaps it lowers the difficulty level so more people can do it and therefor puts downward pressure on wages.

Or… it still requires similar education and experience but programmers end up so much more efficient they earn _more_.

Hard to say right now.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#366

Post by twodave »

asdff wrote: post #175
npteljes wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carteling doesn't work bottom-up. When changes begin (like this one with AI), one of the things an individual can do is to change course as fast as they can. There are other strategies as well, not evolving is also one, but some strategies yield better results than others. Not keeping up just worsens the chances, I have found.

It does when it is called unionizing, however for some reason software developers have a mental block towards the concept.

I would be much more in favor of them as a software developer if I felt the qualifications of other software developers were reliable. But they never have been, and today it’s worse than ever. So I think it’s important to weed some of that out before we start talking about making it harder to fire people.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#367

Post by CivBase »

In my experience some of the hardest parts of software development is figuring out exactly what the stakeholder actually needs. One of the talents a developer needs is the ability to pry for that information. Chatbots simply don't do that, which I imagine has a significant impact on the usability of their output.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#368

Post by twodave »

If you stick with the same software ecosystem long enough you will collect (and improve upon) ways of solving classes of problems. These are things you can more or less reproduce without thinking too much or else build libraries around. An LLM may or may not become superior at this sort of exercise at some point, and might or might not be able to reliably save me some time typing. But these are already the boring things about programming.

So much of it is exploratory, deciding how to solve a problem from a high level, in an understandable way that actually helps the person who it’s intended to help and fits within their constraints. Will an LLM one day be able to do all of that? And how much will it cost to compute? These are the questions we don’t know the answer to yet.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#369

Post by karn97 »

zachlatta wrote: post #359
frogperson wrote: post #349

The context required to write real software is just way too big for LLMs. Software is the business, codified. How is an LLM supposed to know about all the rules in all the departments plus all the special agreements promised to customers by the sales team? Right now the scope of what an LLM can solve is pretty generic and focused. Anytime more than a class or two is involved or if the code base is more than 20 or 30…

I’d encourage you to try the 1M context window on Gemini 2.5 Pro. It’s pretty remarkable. I paste in the entire codebase for my small ETL project (100k tokens) and it’s pretty good. Not perfect, still a long ways to go, but a sign of the times to come.

[flagged]

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#370

Post by [deleted] »

xandrius wrote: post #355
jdiff wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

I think the main reason might be that when the output is good the developer congratulates themselves, and when it's bad they make a post or comment about how bad AI is. Then the people who congratulate the AI for helping get yelled at by the other category.

[deleted]
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