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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#381

Post by vouaobrasil »

noslenwerdna wrote: post #315
vouaobrasil wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again, if a good AI could take on a lot of that work, maybe that means I don't have to sit there in dependency hell and fight arcane missing symbol errors for the rest of my fucking career. My argument really had nothing to do with you and your hobby. It was that AI is signficantly modifying society so that it will be hard for people to do what they like to make money, because AI can do it. If AI can solve some bor…

Everyone should do the tasks where they provide unique value. You could make the same arguments you just made for recorded music, automobiles, computers in general in fact.

Difference is though AI does it much faster and has much fewer central sources that provide the service. The speed and magnitude is important as well, just like a crash at 20km/h is different than a crash at 100km/h. And those other inventions WERE also harmful. Cars -> global warming.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#382

Post by sumeno »

9dev wrote: post #274
palmotea wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is wise to work on your replacement... Depends on the context. You have to keep in mind: it is not a goal of our society or economic system to provide you with a stable, rewarding job. In fact, the incentives are to take that away from you ASAP. Before software engineers go celebrate this tech, they need realize they're going to end up like rust-belt factory workers the day after the plant closed. They're not sp…

Speak for your own society, then. It should absolutely be our shared goal to keep as many people in stable, rewarding employment; if not for compassion, then at least pure egoism—it’s a lot more interesting to be surrounded by happy, educated people than an angry, poor mob. Don’t let cynics rule your country. Go vote. There’s no rule that things have to stay awful.

Sure, but maybe we should do this before we make our own replacements. They aren't going to do it for us after the fact

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#383

Post by robocat »

acquisitionsilk wrote: post #192

It is quite heartening to see so many people care about "good code". I fear it will make no difference. The problem is that the software world got eaten up by the business world many years ago. I'm not sure at what point exactly, or if the writing was already on the wall when Bill Gates' wrote his open letter to hobbyists in 1976. The question is whether shareholders and managers will accept less good code. I don't s…

> Short of some sort of cultural pushback from developers or users

Corporations create great code too: they're not all badly run.

The problem isn't a code quality issue: it is a moral issue of whether you agree with the goals of capitalist businesses.

Many people have to balance the needs of their wallet with their desire for beautiful software (I'm a developer-founder I love engineering and open source community but I'm also capitalist enough to want to live comfortably).

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#384

Post by quantadev »

roflyear wrote: post #180
cushychicken wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT-4o is scary good at writing VHDL. Using it to prototype some low level controllers today, as a matter of fact!

It's better-than-senior at a some things, but worse-than-junior at a lot of things.

It's more like better-than-senior 99% of the time. Makes mistakes 1% of the time. Most of the 'bad results' I've seen people struggle with ended up being the fault of the human, in the form of horrible context given to the AI or else ambiguous or otherwise flawed prompts.

Any skilled developer with a decade of experience can write prompts that return back precisely what we wanted almost every single time. I do it all day long. "Claude 4" rarely messes up.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#385

Post by fHr »

yes of course they are but MBA regard management gets told by McK/Big4 AI could save them millions and they should let go people already as AI can do there work it doesn't matter currently, see job market

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#386

Post by sumeno »

twodave wrote: post #366
asdff wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're doing your boss's job for them by making this an engineer vs engineer thing instead of an engineer vs management thing.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#387

Post by TedDallas »

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.

Yeah, the problem is if you don't understand the problem space then you are going to lean heavy on the LLM. And that can lead you astray. Which is why you still need people who are experts to validate solutions and provide feedback like Op.

My most productive experiences with LLMs is to have my design well thought out first, ask it to help me implement, and then help me debug my shitty design. :-)

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#388

Post by Buttons840 »

Buttons840 wrote: post #379
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…

LLMs aren't my rubber duck, they're my wrong answer. You know that saying that the best way to get an answer online is to post a wrong answer? That's what LLMs do for me. I ask the LLM to do something simple but tedious, and then it does it spectacularly wrong, then I get pissed off enough that I have the rage-induced energy to do it myself.

I'm probably suffering undiagnosed ADHD, and will get stuck and spend minutes picking a function name and then writing a docstring. LLMs do help with this even if they get the code wrong, because I usually won't bother to fix their variables names or docstring unless needed. LLMs can reliably solve the problem of a blank-page.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#389

Post by protocolture »

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #97
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…

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…

>And the answer is “ I don’t know, ChatGPT told me I should do it.”

This weirds me out. Like I use LLMs A LOT but I always sanity check everything, so I can own the result. Its not the use of the LLM that gets me its trying to shift accountability to a tool.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#390

Post by const_cast »

garciasn wrote: post #223
xhevahir wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Lawyers don't even use version control software a lot of the time. They burn hundreds of paralegal hours reconciling revisions, a task that could be made 100x faster and easier with Git.

There's no guarantee a technology will take off, even if it's really, really good. Because we don't decide if that tech takes off - the lawyers do. And they might not care, or they might decide billing more hours is better, actually.

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