The value of LLMs are as a better Stackoverflow. It’s much better than search now because it’s not populated with all the craps that have seeped through over time.
Human coders are still better than LLMs
421–430 of 762 posts
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
the LLM's themselves are making marginal gains, but the tools for using LLMs productively are getting so much better.
This. MCP/tool usage in agentic mode is insanely powerful. Let the agent ingest a Gitlab issue, tell it how it can run commands, tests etc. in the local environment and half of the time it can just iterate towards a solution all by itself (but watching and intervening when it starts going the wrong way is still advisable). Recently I converted all the (Google Docs) documentation of a project to markdown files and add…
Every time I’ve tried to do that it takes longer than it would take me, and comes up with fairly obtuse solutions. The cursor agent seems incapable of putting code in the appropriate files in a functional language.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This. I have ADHD and starting is the hardest part for me. With an LLM it gets me from 0 to 20% (or more) and I can nail it for the rest. It’s way less stressful for me to start now.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#424There'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…
Unrelated, but is this a case of the Pareto Principle? (Admittedly the first time I'm hearing of it) Wherein 80% of the effect is caused by 20% of the input. Or is this more a case of diminishing returns? Where the initial results were incredible, but each succeeding iteration seems to be more disappointing?
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#425Earlier 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".
> 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. IMO, they're still useless today, with the only progress being that they can produce a more convincing facade of usefulness. I wouldn't call that very meaningful progress.
I’ve found them somewhat useful? Not for big things, and not for code for work.
But for small personal projects? Yes, helpful.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#426There'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…
Isn't this also kind of just ... a reddit thing?
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#427There's a lot of resistance to AI amongst the people in this discussion, which is probably to be expected.
A chunk of the objections indicate people trying to shoehorn in their old way of thinking and working.
I think you have to experiment and develop some new approaches to remove the friction and get the benefit.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#428“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.
Yeah, this is what I really like about AI tools though. They're way better than me at annoying minutia like getting CSS syntax right. I used to dread that kind of thing!
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#429“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?
Funny, I find it to be good at things I'm not very strong at (CSS) but terrible at the things I know well (SQL). :)
Actually I think it's perfectly adequate at SQL too.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This has been my experience as well. The biggest problem is that the answers look plausible, and only after implementation and experimentation do you find them to be wrong. If this happened every once in a while then it wouldn't be a big deal, but I'd guess that more than half of the answers and tutorials I've received through ChatGPT have ended up being plain wrong. God help us if companies start relying on LLMs for…
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but in case you're not... From https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/ai-with-90-error-rate...
"UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges" Also "The use of faulty AI is not new for the health care industry."