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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#561

Post by gitaarik »

gitaarik wrote: post #532
JoshCole wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ul…

So to clarify, it could potentially come up with (something close to) C, but if you want it to get to D, E, F etc, it will become less and less accurate for each consequentive step, because it lacks the human curated reward models up to that point. Only if you create new reward models for C, the output for D will improve, and so on.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#562

Post by h4kunamata »

This!!!!

LLM is as good as the material it is being trained on, the same applies to AI and they are not perfect.

Perplexity AI did assist me in getting into Python from 0 to getting my code test with 94% covered and no vulnerabilities (scanning tools) Google Gemini is dogshit

Trusting blindly into a code generated by LLM/AI is a whole complete beast, and I am seeing developers doing basically copy/paste into company's code. People are using these sources as the truth and not as a complementary tool to improve their productivity.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#563

Post by shrewduser »

vidarh wrote: post #208
marcosdumay wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why state the same arguments everybody has been repeating for ages? LLMs can only give you code that somebody has wrote before. This is inherent. This is useful for a bunch of stuff, but that bunch won't change if OpenAI decides to spend the GDP of Germany training one instead of Costa Rica.

> LLMs can only give you code that somebody has wrote before. This is inherent. This is trivial to prove to be false. Invent a programming language that does not exist. Describe its semantics to an LLM. Ask it to write a program to solve a problem in that language. It will not always work, but it will work often enough to demonstrate that they are very much capable of writing code that has never been written before.…

This doesn't surprise me, i find LLM's are really good at interpolating and translating. so if i made up a language and gave it the rules and asked it to translate i wouldn't expect it to be bad at it.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#564

Post by fhd2 »

fl7305 wrote: post #108
jdiff wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crazy thing is that people think that a model designed to predict sequences of tokens from a stem, no matter how advanced the model, to be much more than just "really good autocomplete." It is impressive and very unintuitive just how far that can get you, but it's not reductive to use that label. That's what it is on a fundamental level, and aligning your usage with that will allow it to be more effective.

> "The crazy thing is that people think that a model designed to" It's even crazier that some people believe that humans "evolved" intelligence just by nature selecting the genes which were best at propagating. Clearly, human intelligence is the product of a higher being designing it. /s

I would consider evolution a form of intelligence, even though I wouldn't consider nature a being.

There's a branch of AI research I was briefly working in 15 years ago, based on that premise: Genetic algorithms/programming.

So I'd argue humans were (and are continuously being) designed, in a way.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#565

Post by darkwater »

dingnuts wrote: post #470
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in 10 seconds

I've seen very long prompts that are as long as a school essay and those didn't take ten seconds either

To some extent those fail in the same category of cheaters that put way more effort into cheating an exam than doing it properly. Or people paying 10/15 bucks a month to access a private Usenet server to download pirate content.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#566

Post by darkwater »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #449
therealpygon wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This seems to be what’s happened People are expecting perfection from bad spec Isn’t that what engineers are (rightfully) always complaining about to BD?

Indeed. But that's the price an automated tool has to pay to take a job from humans' hands. It has to do it better with the same conditions. The same applies to self-driving cars: you don't want an accident rate equals to human drivers. You want two or three orders of magnitude better.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#567

Post by cheema33 »

am17an wrote: post #67

All 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…

> All the world's smartest minds are racing towards replacing themselves.

I think they are hoping that their future is safe. And it is the average minds that will have to go first. There may be some truth to it.

Also, many of these smartest minds are motivated by money, to safeguard their future, from a certain doom that they know might be coming. And AI is a good place to be if you want to accumulate wealth fast.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#569

Post by Panzer04 »

cushychicken wrote: post #153
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…

ChatGPT-4o is scary good at writing VHDL. Using it to prototype some low level controllers today, as a matter of fact!

What kind of things is it doing?

I have a hard time imagining an LLM being able to do arbitrary things. It always feels like LLMs can do lots of the easy stuff, but if they can't do everything you need the skilled engineer anyway, who'd knock the easy things out in a week anyway.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#570

Post by qwertox »

foxyv wrote: post #69
marcosdumay wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a damning assertive duck, completely out of proportion to its competence. I've seen enough people led astray by talking to it.

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.

What one would expect if they can't read the code because they haven't learned to code.

TBF, trial and error has usually been my path as well, it's just that I was generating the errors so I would know where to find them.

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