This is similar to my usage of LLMs. I use Windsurf sometimes but more often it is more of a conversation about approaches.
Human coders are still better than LLMs
471–480 of 762 posts
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had this same thought that it would be nice to have an AI rubber ducky to bounce ideas off of while pair programming (so that you don't sound dumb to your coworkers & waste their time). This is my first comment so I'm not sure how to do this but I made a BYO-API key VSCode extension that uses the OpenAI realtime API so you can have interactive voice conversations with a rubber ducky. I've been meaning to create…
I like the sound of that! I think youre gonna like what we are building here https://github.com/akdeb/ElatoAI Its as if the rubber duck was actually on the desk while youre programming and if we have an MCP that can get live access to code it could give you realtime advice.
Wow, that's really cool thanks for open sourcing! I might dig into your MCP I've been meaning to learn how to do that.
I genuinely think this could be great for toys that kids grow up with i.e. the toy could adjust the way it talks depending on the kids age and remember key moments in their life - could be pretty magical for a kid
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it automates 1/5th of your work, then what's unreasonable about thinking that your team could be 4 developers instead of 5?
If software costs 80% as much to write, what's unreasonable about thinking that more businesses would integrate more of it, hiring more developers?
Bingo. This additional throughput could be used to create more polished software. What happens in a free market; would your competitor fall behind or will they try to match your polish?
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#474All 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.
I don't know how someone could be following the technical progress in detail and hold this view. The progress is astonishing, and the benchmarks are becoming saturated so fast that it's hard to keep track.
Are there plenty of gaps left between here and most definitions of AGI? Absolutely. Nevertheless, how can you be sure that those gaps will remain given how many faculties these models have already been able to excel at (translation, maths, writing, code, chess, algorithm design etc.)?
It seems to me like we're down to a relatively sparse list of tasks and skills where the models aren't getting enough training data, or are missing tools and sub-components required to excel. Beyond that, it's just a matter of iterative improvement until 80th percentile coder becomes 99th percentile coder becomes superhuman coder, and ditto for maths, persuasion and everything else.
Maybe we hit some hard roadblocks, but room for those challenges to be hiding seems to be dwindling day by day.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the conversational interface, for some reason, seems to turn off the natural skepticism that people have n=1 but after having chatgpt "lie" to me more than once i am very skeptical of it and always double check it, whereas something like tv or yt videos i still find myself being click-baited or grifted (iow less skeptical) much more easily still... any large studies about this would be very interesting...
I get irrationally frustrated when ChatGPT hallucinates npm packages / libraries that simply do not exist. This happens… weekly for me.
"Hey chatgpt I want to integrate a slidepot into this project"
>from PiicoDev_SlidePot import PiicoDev_SlidePot
Weird how these guys used exactly my terminology when they usually say "Potentiometer"
Went and looked it up, found a resource outlining that it uses the same class as the dial potentiometer.
"Hey chatgpt, I just looked it up and the slidepots actually use the same Potentiometer class as the dialpots."
scurries to fix its stupid mistake
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#476Earlier 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.
Yep. I like maths, I hate graphing. Tedious work even with state of the art libraries and wrappers. LLMs do it for me. Praise be.
Yeah, I write a lot of little data analysis scripts and stuff, and I am happy just to read the numbers, but now I get nice PNGs of the distributions and so on from LLM, and people like that.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
very much agree. although lately with how good it is i get hyperfocused and spent more time then i allocated because i ended up wanting to implement more than i planned.
It’s a struggle right? First world LLM problems.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#478Earlier 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.
Out of curiosity can you give me an example prompt(s) you’ve used and been disappointed I see these comments all the time and they don’t reflect my experience so I’m curious what your experience has been
I asked Chat GPT 4o to write an Emacs function to highlight a line. This involves setting the "mark" at the beginning, and the "point" at the end. It would only set the point, so I corrected it "no, you have to set both", but even after correction it would move the point to the beginning, and then moved the point again to the end, without ever touching the mark.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
> LLMs are a decent search engine a la Google circa 2005. Statistical text (token) generation made from an unknown (to the user) training data set is not the same as a keyword/faceted search of arbitrary content acquired from web crawlers. > The problem is that the conversational interface, for some reason, seems to turn off the natural skepticism that people have when they use a search engine. For me, my skepticism…
I almost never bother using Google anymore. When I search for something, I'm usually looking for an answer to question. Now I can just ask the question and get the answer without all the other stuff. I will often ask the LLM to give me web pages to look at it when I want to do further reading. As LLMs get better, I can't see myself going back to Google as it is or even as it was.
It’s only a matter of time before Google merges search with Gemini. I don’t think you’ll have to wait long.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#480Earlier 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.
I’m self taught and don’t code that much but I feel like I benefit a ton from LLMs giving me specific answers to questions that would take me a lot of time to figure out with documentation and stack overflow. Or even generating snippets that I can evaluate whether or not will work. But I actually can’t imagine how you can teach someone to code if they have access to an LLM from day one. It’s too easy to take the easy…
I think you can learn a lot from debugging, and all the code I've put into prod from LLM has needed debugging (rather more than it should from the LOC count).