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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#51

Post by _tom_ »

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…

For me, it's a bit like pair programming. I have someone to discuss ideas with. Someone to review my code and suggest alternative approaches. Some one that uses different feature than I do, so I learn from them.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#52

Post by gerad »

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 like chess. Humans are better for now, they won't be forever, but humans plus software is going to better than either alone for a long time.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#53

Post by lelandfe »

marcosdumay wrote: post #44
kccqzy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and most devs I’d imagine What an awful imagination. Yes there are people who don't like CSS but are forced to use it by their job so they don't learn it properly, and that's why they think CSS is rote memorization. But overall I agree with you that if a company is too cheap to hire a person who is actually skilled at CSS, it is still better to hoist that CSS job onto LLMs than an unwilling human. Because that unwi…

Hum... I imagine LLMs are better than every developer on getting CSS keywords right like the GP pointed. And I expect every LLM to be slightly worse than most classical autocompletes.

I'm one of those weirdos who really likes handwriting CSS. I frequently find ChatGPT getting my requests wrong.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#54

Post by prophesi »

ehutch79 wrote: post #24
decasia wrote: post #10

We aren't expecting LLMs to come up with incredibly creative software designs right now, we are expecting them to execute conventional best practices based on common patterns. So it makes sense to me that it would not excel at the task that it was given here. The whole thing seems like a pretty good example of collaboration between human and LLM tools.

Uh, no. I've seen the twitter posts saying llms will replace me. I've watched the youtube videos saying llms will code whole apps on one prompt, but are light on details or only show the most basic todo app from every tutorial. We're being told that llms are now reasoning, which implies they can make logical leaps and employ creativity to solve problems. The hype cycle is real and setting expectations that get higher…

> The hype cycle is real and setting expectations that get higher with _the less you know about how they work_.

I imagine on HN, the expectations we're talking about are from fellow software developers who at least have a general idea on how LLM's work and their limitations.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#55

Post by malfist »

yua_mikami wrote: post #42

The thing everyone forgets when talking about LLMs replacing coders is that there is much more to software engineering than writing code, in fact that's probably one of the smaller aspects of the job. One major aspect of software engineering is social, requirements analysis and figuring out what the customer actually wants, they often don't know. If a human engineer struggles to figure out what a customer wants and a…

That was also one of the challenges during the offshoring craze in the 00s. The offshore teams did not have the power, or knowledge to push back on things and just built and built and built. Sounds very similar to AI right?

Probably going to have the same outcome.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#56

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#58

Post by cortesoft »

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…

Currently, I find AI to be a really good autocomplete

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#59

Post by rowanG077 »

yua_mikami wrote: post #42

The thing everyone forgets when talking about LLMs replacing coders is that there is much more to software engineering than writing code, in fact that's probably one of the smaller aspects of the job. One major aspect of software engineering is social, requirements analysis and figuring out what the customer actually wants, they often don't know. If a human engineer struggles to figure out what a customer wants and a…

I think LLMs are better at requirement elicitation than they are at actually writing code.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#60

Post by some-guy »

The main thing LLMs have helped me with, and always comes back to, tasks that require bootstrapping / Googling:

1) Starting simple codebases 2) Googling syntax 3) Writing bash scripts that utilize Unix commands whose arguments I have never bothered to learn in the first place.

I definitely find time savings with these, but the esoteric knowledge required to work on a 10+ year old codebase is simply too much for LLMs still, and the code alone doesn't provide enough context to do anything meaningful, or even faster than I would be able to do myself.

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