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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#571

Post by xarope »

Buttons840 wrote: post #379
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…

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.

I have to upvote this, because this is how I felt after trying three times (that I consciously decided to give an LLM a try, versus having it shoved down my throat by google/ms/meta/etc) and giving up (for now).

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#572

Post by gherkinnn »

ehansdais wrote: post #416
mywittyname wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, I find it strong at things I don't know very well (CSS), but terrible at things I know well (SQL). This is probably really just a way of saying, it's better at simple tasks rather than complex ones. I can eventually get Copilot to write SQL that's complex and accurate, but I don't find it faster or more effective than writing it myself.

Actually, you've reinforced their point. It's only bad at things the user is actually good at because the user actually knows enough in that domain to find the flaws and issues. It appears to be good in domains the user is bad at because the user doesn't know any better. In reality, the LLM is just bad at all domains; it's simply whether a user has the skill to discern it. Of course, I don't believe it's as black and…

Yes, that is precisely what I meant. It just occurred to me and I will see how that idea holds up.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#573

Post by dfedbeef »

declan_roberts wrote: post #482
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 would absolutely love to write my own placement. When I can have AI do my job while I go to the beach you better believe I will be at the beach.

You are assuming you'll continue to be paid?

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#574

Post by Corey_ »

akshay_trikha wrote: post #446
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…

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…

[dead]

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#575

Post by stevenhuang »

nssnsjsjsjs wrote: post #410
zachlatta wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes… I did?

I think by context they meant context as in common usage not context window size.

They know that, and they mean it to be the same thing, because all relevant context can be placed into the context window.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#576

Post by JackSlateur »

chii wrote: post #506
JackSlateur wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code is meant to power your business Bad code leads to bad business This makes me think of hosting departement; You know, which people who are using vmware, physical firewalls, dpi proxies and whatnot; On the other edge, you have public cloud providers, which are using qemu, netfilter, dumb networking devices and stuff Who got eaten by whom, nobody could have guessed ..

> Bad code leads to bad business Bad business leads to bad business. Bad code might be bad, or might be sufficient. It's situational. And by looking at what exists today, majority of code is pretty bad already - and not all businesses with bad code lead to bad businesses. In fact, some bad code are very profitable for some businesses (ask any SAP integrator).

It is the survivor bias: "by looking at what is still alive today, majority of code is pretty bad"

It eludes all of those who died in the process : those still alives are here despite bad IT, not due to a bad IT

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#577

Post by 0points »

garciasn wrote: post #223
xhevahir wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude is depressingly common in lots of professional, white-collar industries I'm afraid. I just came from the /r/law subreddit and was amazed at the kneejerk dismissal there of Dario Amodei's recent comments about legal work, and of those commenters who took them seriously. It's probably as much a coping mechanism as it is complacency, but, either way, it bodes very poorly for our future efforts at mitigatin…

This is the response to most new technologies; folks simply don't want to accept the future before the ramifications truly hit. If technology folk cannot see the INCREDIBLE LEAP FORWARD made by LLMs since ChatGPT came on the market, they're not seeing the forest through the trees because their heads are buried in the sand. LLMs for coding are not even close to imperfect, yet, but the saturation curves are not flatten…

> If technology folk cannot see the INCREDIBLE LEAP FORWARD made by LLMs since ChatGPT came on the market, they're not seeing the forest through the trees because their heads are buried in the sand.

Look, we see the forest. We are just not impressed by it.

Having unlimited chaos monkeys at will is not revolutionizing anything.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#578

Post by 0points »

chii wrote: post #502
eikenberry wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is only (or even mostly) not wanting to accept it, I think it is at least equal measure just plain skepticism. We've seen all sorts of wild statements about how much something is going to revolutionize X and then turns out to be nothing. Most people disbelieve these sorts of claims until they see real evidence for themselves... and that is a good default position.

hedging the possibility that they get displaced economically before it happens is always prudent. If the future didnt turn out to be revolutionary, you now have done some "unnecessary" work at worst, but might've acquired some skills or value at least. In the case of most well off programmers, i suspect buying assets/investments which can afford them at least a reasonable lifestyle is likely too. So the default posit…

> One should always assume the worst possible outcome, and plan for that.

Maybe if you work e-commerce or in the military.

But how do you even translate this line of thought for today?

Is you EMP defenses up to speed?

Are you studying russian and chinese while selling kidneys in order to afford your retirement home on Mars?

My point being, you can never plan for every worst outcome. In reality you would have a secondary data center, backups and a working recovery routine.

None of which matters if you use autocomplete or not.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#579

Post by mettamage »

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…

> One major aspect of software engineering is social, requirements analysis and figuring out what the customer actually wants, they often don't know.

It really depends on the organization. In many places product owners and product managers do this nowadays.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#580

Post by lazyasciiart »

materiallie wrote: post #552
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.

This is my experience, too. As a concrete example, I'll need to write a mapper function to convert between a protobuf type and Go type. The types are mirror reflections of each other, and I feed the complete APIs of both in my prompt. I've yet to find an LLM that can reliability generate mapping code between proto.Foo{ID string} to gomodel.Foo{ID string}. It still saves me time, because even 50% accuracy is still hal…

An LLM ability to do a task is roughly correlated to the number of times that task has been done on the internet before. If you want to see the hype version, you need to write a todo web app in typescript or similar. So it's probably not something you can fix with prompts, but having a model with more focus on relevant training data might help.
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