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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#591

Post by IshKebab »

dwattttt wrote: post #327
eptcyka wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some humans are the same.

We also don't aim to elevate them. We instead try not to give them responsibility until they're able to handle it.

Yeah... I dunno, the one person I've worked with who had LLM levels of bullshit somehow pulled the wool over everyone's eyes. Or at least enough people's eyes to be relatively successful. I presume there were some people that could see the bullshit but none of them were in a position to call him out on it.

I think I read some research somewhere that pathological bullshitters can be surprisingly successful.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#592

Post by IshKebab »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #344
smokel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stating this without any arguments is not very convincing. 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. That is progress, and that does give reason to extrapolate. Unless of course you mean something very special with "solving programming".

> 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.

They are very clearly not useless. You haven't given them a fair shake.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#593

Post by seabirdman »

Super hard problems are often solved by making strange weird connections derived from deep experience plus luck. Like finding the one right key in a pile of keys. The intuition you used to solve your problem IS probably beyond current agents. But, that too will change perhaps by harnessing the penchant of these systems to “hallucinate”? Or, some method or separate algorithm for dealing with super hard problems creatively and systematically. Recently, I was working on a hard imaging problem (for me) and remembered a bug I had inadvertently introduced and fixed a few days earlier. I was like wait a minute - because in that random bug I saw opportunity and was able to actually use the bug to solve my problem. I went back to my agent and it agreed that there was virtually no way it could have ever seen and solved the problem in that way. But that too will come. Rest assured.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#594

Post by hatefulmoron »

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…

What if all work is no longer necessary? Then yes, we're going to have to rethink how our society works. Fair enough.

I'm a bit confused by your read on the people who don't make it through college. The implication is that if you don't make it into a high status/white collar job, you're destined for a life of poverty. I feel like this speaks more to the insecurity of the white collar worker, and isn't actually a good reflection of reality. Most of my friends dropped out of college and did something completely different in the service industry, it's not really a "life of poverty."

> My parents got high paying jobs straight out of highschool. Now, highschool grads are destined to flip burgers.

This feels like pure luck for your parents. Take a wider look at history -- it's just a regression to the mean. We used to have _less_ complex jobs. Mathematics/science hasn't always been a job. That is to say, burger-flipping or an equivalent was more common. It was not the norm that households were held together by a single man's income, etc.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#595

Post by austin-cheney »

In many cases developers are a low expectation commodity. In those cases I strongly believe humans are entirely replaceable by AI and I am saying that as somebody with an exceptionally low opinion of LLMs.

Honestly though, when that replacement comes there is no sympathy to be had. Many developers have brought this upon themselves. For roughly the 25 year period from 1995 to 2020 businesses have been trying to turn developers into mindless commodities that are straight forward to replace. Developers have overwhelmingly encouraged this and many still do. These are the people who hop employers every 2 years and cannot do their jobs without lying on their resumes or complete reliance on a favorite framework.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#596

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

cyjackx wrote: post #456
ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tbf, there's a phase of learning to code where everything is pretty much an incantation you learn because someone told you "just trust me." There really shouldn't be. You don't need to know all the turtles by name, but "trust me" doesn't cut it most of the time. You need a minimal understanding to progress smoothly. Knowledge debt is a b*tch.

I remember when I first learned Java, having to just accept "public static void main(String[] args)" before I understood what any of it was. All I knew was that went on top around the block and I did the code inside it. Should people really understand every syntax there before learning simpler commands like printing, ifs, and loops? I think it would yes, be a nicer learning experience, but I'm not sure it's actually…

If you need to learn "public static void main(String[] args)" just to print to a screen or use a loop, means you're using the wrong language.

When it's time to learn Java you're supposed to be past the basics. Old-school intros to programming starts with flowcharts for a reason.

You can learn either way, of course, but with one, people get tied up to a particular language-specific model and then have all kinds of discomfort when it's time to switch.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#597

Post by zxexz »

austin-cheney wrote: post #595

In many cases developers are a low expectation commodity. In those cases I strongly believe humans are entirely replaceable by AI and I am saying that as somebody with an exceptionally low opinion of LLMs. Honestly though, when that replacement comes there is no sympathy to be had. Many developers have brought this upon themselves. For roughly the 25 year period from 1995 to 2020 businesses have been trying to turn d…

I find myself wondering about your story, and would love it if you would elaborate more. I have gotten some use out of LLMs, and have been quite involved in training a few compute intensive (albeit domain-specific) ones.

Maybe it's the way you talk about 'developers'. Nothing I have seen has felt like the sky falling on an industry; to me at most it's been the sky falling on a segment of silicon valley.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#598

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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.

No they don't, they generate a statistically plausible text response given a sequence of tokens.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#599

Post by Draiken »

foobar83 wrote: post #589
sixQuarks wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but we can see current progress and extrapolate into the future. I give it 2/3 years before AI can code as well as a senior level coder

Recent benchmarks show that improvements in the latest models are beginning to slow down, what makes you so sure there's another breakthrough coming?

Copium.

People that bet on this bubble have to keep it as big and for as long as possible.

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