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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#531

Post by auggierose »

anonzzzies wrote: post #515
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are so many examples where all current top models just will loop forever even if you instruct them literally the code. We know many of them, but for instance in a tailwind react project with some degree of complexity (nested components), if you ask for something to scroll in it's space, it will never figure out min-h-0 even if you tell it. It will just loop forever rewriting the code adding and removing things,…

This is probably not so much an indictment of the AI, as of that garbage called Tailwind. As somebody here said before, garbage in, garbage out.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#532

Post by gitaarik »

JoshCole wrote: post #345
gitaarik wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's not just token support, it's also having a understanding of certain concepts that allows you to arrive at new points like C, D, E, etc. But LLM's don't have an understanding of things, they are statistical models that predict what statistically is most likely following the input that you give it. But that that will always be based on already existing data that is fed into the model. It can produce "new"…

> it can't "think" of something entirety conceptionally new, because it doesn't really "think". Hierarchical optimization (fast global + slow local) is a precise, implementable notion of "thinking." Whenever I've seen this pattern implemented, humans, without being told to do so by others in some forced way, seem to converge on the use of verb think to describe the operation. I think you need to blacklist the term th…

Yes ok, it can generate new stuff, but it's dependent on human curated reward models to score the output to make it usable. So it still depends on human thinking, it's own "thinking" is not sufficient. And there won't be a point when human curated reward models are not needed anymore.

LLM's will make a lot of things easier for humans, because most of the thinking the humans do have been automated into the LLM. But ultimately you run into a limit where the human has to take over.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#533

Post by energy123 »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #71

There'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…

Their confusion is your competitive advantage in the labor market.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#534

Post by ori_b »

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…

> If a human engineer struggles to figure out what a customer wants and a customer struggles to specify it, how can an LLM be expected to?

Presumably, they're trained on a ton of requirements docs, as well as a huge number of customer support conversations. I'd expect them to do this at least as well as coding, and probably better.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#535

Post by geraneum »

lyu07282 wrote: post #265
AstroBen wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately this needs to be solved politically Making our work more efficient, or humans redundant should be really exciting. It's not set in stone that we need to leave people middle aged with families and now completely unable to earn enough to provide a good life Hopefully if it happens, it happens to such a huge amount of people that it forces a change

But that already happened to lots of industries and lots of people, we never cared before about them, now it's us so we care, but nothing is different about us. Just learn to code!

> But that already happened to lots of industries and lots of people, we never cared before about them

We did. Why do you think labor laws, unions, etc. exist? Why do you think communism was appealing as an idea in the beginning to many? Whether the effects were good or bad or enough or not, that’s a different question. But these changes have demonstrably, grave consequences.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#536

Post by DevDesmond »

Buttons840 wrote: post #478
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From my experience, (and to borrow terminology from a HN thread not long ago), I've found that once a chat goes bad, your context is "poisoned"; It's auto completing from previous text that is nonsense, so, further text generation from there exist in the world of nonexistent nonsense as well. It's much better to edit your message and try again.

I also think that language matters - An Emacs function is much more esoteric than say, JavaScript, Python, or Java. If I ever find myself looking for help with something that's not in the standard library, I like provide extra context, such as examples from the documentation.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#537

Post by ukuina »

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…

> when the meta changes the people that were at the top will quickly find themselves at the top again.

I think parent is agreeing with you?

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

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#538

Post by sanderjd »

codr7 wrote: post #497
sanderjd wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

And you will keep dreading it for as long as you use them, since you learn nothing from solutions served on a silver plate.

The point is that I don't dread it anymore, because now there are tools that make it a lot easier the one or two times a year I have some reason to use it.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#539

Post by abalashov »

Zamaamiro wrote: post #504
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in 10 seconds

You probably didn’t write up a detailed prompt with perfect specifications in 10 seconds, either. In my experience, it doesn’t matter how good or detailed the prompt is—after enough lines of code, the LLM starts making design decisions for you. This is why I don’t accept LLM completions for anything that isn’t short enough to quickly verify that it is implemented exactly as I would have myself. Usually, that’s boiler…

> This is why I don’t accept LLM completions for anything that isn’t short enough to quickly verify that it is implemented exactly as I would have myself. Usually, that’s boilerplate code.

^ This. This is where I've landed as far as the extent of LLM coding assistants for me.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#540

Post by specproc »

ilamont wrote: post #376
cogogo wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’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 Same here. Combing discussion forums and KB pages for an hour or two, seeking how to solve a certain problem with a specific tool has been replaced by a 50-100 word prompt in Gemini which gives very helpful rep…

I really value forums and worry about the impact LLMs are having on them.

Stackoverflow has its flaws for sure, but I've learned a hell of a lot watching smart people argue it out in a thread.

Actual learning: the pros and cons of different approaches. Even the downvoted answers tell you something often.

Asking an LLM gets you a single response from a median stackoverflow commenter. Sure, they're infinitely patient and responsive, but can never beat a few grizzled smart arses trying to one-up each other.

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