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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#521

Post by johnb231 »

drob518 wrote: post #479
wvenable wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Already happened.

Google search includes an AI generated response.

Gemini prompts return Google search results.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#522

Post by halpow »

bouncycastle wrote: post #314

Last night I spent hours fighting o3. I never made a Dockerfile in my life, so I thought it would be faster just getting o3 to point to the GitHub repo and let it figure out, rather than me reading the docs and building it myself. I spent hours debugging the file it gave me... It kept on adding hallucinations for things that didn't exist, and removing/rewriting other parts, and other big mistakes like understanding t…

They're great at one-shotting verbose code, but if they're generate bad code the first time you're out of luck.

I don’t think I ever got to write "this api doesn't exist" and then gotten a useful alternative.

Claude is the only one that regularly tells me something isn't possible rather than making sh up.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#523

Post by johnb231 »

traceroute66 wrote: post #163
klntsky wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that they are never led astray by chatting, but rather by accepting the projection of their own prompt passed through the model as some kind of truth. When talking with reasonable people, they have an intuition of what you want even if you don't say it, because there is a lot of non-verbal context. LLMs lack the ability to understand the person, but behave as if they had it.

> When talking with reasonable people When talking with reasonable people, they will tell you if they don't understand what you're saying. When talking with reasonable people, they will tell you if they don't know the answer or if they are unsure about their answer. LLMs do none of that. They will very happily, and very confidently, spout complete bullshit at you. It is essentially a lotto draw as to whether the answ…

I think you are a couple of years out of date.

No longer an issue with the current SOTA reasoning models.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#524

Post by [deleted] »

abletonlive wrote: post #501
kweingar wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why devs who started with J2ME are the holy grail of app developers, since they started making apps years before iPhone devs

you sound mad you could be spending this time upskilling instead. but i'll say it again, when the meta changes the people that were at the top will quickly find themselves at the top again. listen, the reason why they were in the top in the first place and you aren't is a mindset thing. the top are the curious that are experimenting and refining, sharing with each other techniques developed over time. the complacent…

[deleted]

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#525

Post by conradkay »

drdeca wrote: post #425
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's funny how there's a decent % of people at both "LLMs are useless" and "LLMs 3-10x my productivity"

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#526

Post by bluefirebrand »

const_cast wrote: post #396
hatefulmoron wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When we moved from more physical jobs to desk jobs many of us became sedentary and overweight. Now we are in an "obesity crisis". There's multiple factors to that, it's not just being in desk jobs, but being sedentary is a big factor. Sure, although I think our lives are generally better than they were a few hundred years ago. Besides, if you care about your health you can always take steps yourself. > The only one…

> If technology makes us redundant, then we find new jobs. Same as it ever was. Except, of course, it's not the same as it ever was because you do actually run out of jobs. And it's significantly sooner than you think, because people have limits. I can't be Einstein, you can't be Einstein. If that becomes the standard, you and I will both starve. We've been pushing people up and up the chain of complexity, and we can…

> Uh... robot flippers.

Prompt engineers

You are spot on with your analysis. At some point there will be nothing left for people to do except at the very top level. What happens then?

I am not optimistic enough to believe that we create a utopia for everyone. We would need to solve scarcity first, at minimum.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#527

Post by insane_dreamer »

Coders may want to look at translators for an idea of what might happen.

Translation software has been around for a couple of decades. It was pretty shitty. But about 10 years ago it started to get to the point where it could translate relatively accurately. However, it couldn't produce text that sounded like it was written by a human. A good translator (and there are plenty of bad ones) could easy outperform a machine. Their jobs were "safe".

I speak several languages quite well and used to do freelance translation work. I noticed that as the software got better, you'd start to see companies who instead of paying you to translate wanted to pay you less to "edit" or "proofread" a document pre-translated by machine. I never accepted such work because sometimes it took almost as much work as translating it from scratch, and secondly, I didn't want to do work where the focus wasn't on quality. But I saw the software steadily improving, and this was before ChatGPT, and I realized the writing was on the wall. So I decided not to become dependent on that for an income stream, and moved away from it.

When LLMs came out, and they now produce text that sounded like it was written by a native speaker (in major languages). Sure, it's not going to win any literary awards, but the vast vast majority of translation work out there is commercial, not literature.

Several things have happened: 1) there's very little translation work available compared to before, because now you can pay only a few people to double-check machine-generated translations (that are fairly good to start with); 2) many companies aren't using humans at all as the translations are "good enough" and a few mistakes won't matter that much; 3) the work that is available is high-volume and uninteresting, no longer a creative challenge (which is why I did it in the first place); 4) downward pressure on translation rates (which are typically per word), and 5) very talented translators (who are more like writers/artists) are still in demand for literary works or highly creative work (i.e., major marketing campaign), so the top 1% translators still have their jobs. Also more niche language pairs for which LLMs aren't trained will be safe.

It will continue to exist as a profession, but diminishing, until it'll eventually be a fraction of what it was 10 or 15 years ago.

(This is specifically translating written documents, not live interpreting which isn't affected by this trend, or at least not much.)

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#528

Post by tcoff91 »

mywittyname wrote: post #312
some-guy wrote: post #60

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…

LLMs are amazing at shell scripting. It's one of those tasks where I always half-ass it because I don't really know how to properly handle errors and never really learned the correct way. But man, perplexity and poop out a basic shell script in a few seconds with pretty much every edge case I can think of covered.

It really is the thing they are best at.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#529

Post by geraneum »

therealpygon wrote: post #399
Buttons840 wrote: post #379

Earlier 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.

LLMs follow instructions. Garbage in = garbage out generally. When attention is managed and a problem is well defined and necessary materials are available to it, they can perform rather well. On the other hand, I find a lot of the loosely-goosey vibe coding approach to be useless and gives a lot of false impressions about how useful LLMs can be, both too positive and too negative.

> LLMs follow instructions.

Not really, not always. To anyone who’s used the latest LLMs extensively, it’s clear that this is not something you can reliably assume even with the constraints you mentioned.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#530

Post by ori_b »

allturtles wrote: post #161
Jolter wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s the deal: if you won’t write your replacement, a competitor will do it and outprice your employer. Either way you’re out of a job. May be more prudent to adapt to the new tools and master them rather than be left behind? Do you want to be a jobless weaver, or an engineer building mechanical looms for a higher pay than the weaver got?

I think it's the wrong analogy. The prompt engineer who uses the AI to make code maps to the poorly-paid, low-skill power loom machine tender. The "engineer" is the person who created the model. But it's also not totally clear to me that we'll need humans for that either, in the near future.

At some point, we'll probably have these things write their own prompts, too.
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