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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#61

Post by skydhash »

marcosdumay wrote: post #44
kccqzy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and most devs I’d imagine What an awful imagination. Yes there are people who don't like CSS but are forced to use it by their job so they don't learn it properly, and that's why they think CSS is rote memorization. But overall I agree with you that if a company is too cheap to hire a person who is actually skilled at CSS, it is still better to hoist that CSS job onto LLMs than an unwilling human. Because that unwi…

Hum... I imagine LLMs are better than every developer on getting CSS keywords right like the GP pointed. And I expect every LLM to be slightly worse than most classical autocompletes.

Getting CSS keywords right is not the actual point of writing CSS. And you can have a linter that helps you in that regards. The endgame of writing CSS is to style an HTML page according to the specifications of a design. Which can be as detailed as a figma file or as flimsy as a drawing on a whiteboard.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#62

Post by jjgreen »

lelandfe wrote: post #53
marcosdumay wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hum... I imagine LLMs are better than every developer on getting CSS keywords right like the GP pointed. And I expect every LLM to be slightly worse than most classical autocompletes.

I'm one of those weirdos who really likes handwriting CSS. I frequently find ChatGPT getting my requests wrong.

... even better with a good fountain pen ...

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#63

Post by victorbjorklund »

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…

Yea, this is why I dont buy the "all developers will disappear". Will I write a lot less code in 5 years (maybe almost none)? Sure, I already type a lot less now than a year ago. But that is just a small part of the process.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#64

Post by sofal »

sixQuarks wrote: post #22
vouaobrasil wrote: post #3

The question is, for how long?

Exactly! We’ve been seeing more and more posts like this, saying how AI will never take developer jobs or will never be as good as coders. I think it’s some sort of coping mechanism. These posts are gonna look really silly in the not too distant future. I get it, spending countless hours honing your craft and knowing that AI will soon make almost everything you learned useless is very scary.

I'm constantly disappointed by how little I'm able to delegate to AI after the unending promises that I'll be able to delegate nearly 100% of what I do now "in the not too distant future". It's tired impatience and merited skepticism that you mistake for fear and coping. Just because people aren't on the hype train with you doesn't mean they're afraid.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#65

Post by marcosdumay »

smokel wrote: post #46
marcosdumay wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs will still be this way 10 years from now. But IDK if somebody won't create something new that gets better. But there is no reason at all to extrapolate our current AIs into something that solves programing. Whatever constraints that new thing will have will be completely unrelated to the current ones.

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".

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.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#66

Post by riknos314 »

pupppet wrote: post #23

If an LLM just finds patterns, is it even possible for an LLM to be GOOD at anything? Doesn't that mean at best it will be average?

My experience is that LLMs regress to the average of the context they have for the task at hand.

If you're getting average results you most likely haven't given it enough details about what you're looking for.

The same largely applies to hallucinations. In my experience LLMs hallucinate significantly more when at or pushed to exceed the limits of their context.

So if you're looking to get a specific output, your success rate is largely determined by how specific and comprehensive the context the LLM has access to is.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#67

Post by am17an »

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 public i.e. extremely proprietary (e.g. Defense, Finance) and even those will rely heavily on customized AIs.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#68

Post by skydhash »

dpkirchner wrote: post #27
zdragnar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's great if it's for something outside of your primary language. I've used it to good effect in that way myself. However, denying yourself the reflexive memory of having learned those things is a quick way to become wholly dependent upon the tool. You could easily end up with compromised solutions because the tool recommends something you don't understand well enough to know there's a better way to do som…

You're right, however I think we've already gone through this before. Most of us (probably) couldn't tell you exactly how an optimizing compiler picks optimizations or exactly how JavaScript maps to processor instructions, etc -- we hopefully understand enough at one level of abstraction to do our jobs. Maybe LLM driving will be another level of abstraction, when it gets better at (say) architecting projects.

> Most of us (probably) couldn't tell you exactly how an optimizing compiler picks optimizations or exactly how JavaScript maps to processor instructions,

That's because other people are making those working well. It's like how you don't care about how the bread is being made because you trust your baker (or the regulations). It's a chain of trust that is easily broken when LLMs are brought in.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#69

Post by foxyv »

marcosdumay wrote: post #56
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…

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.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#70

Post by bluefirebrand »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #41
zdragnar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's great if it's for something outside of your primary language. I've used it to good effect in that way myself. However, denying yourself the reflexive memory of having learned those things is a quick way to become wholly dependent upon the tool. You could easily end up with compromised solutions because the tool recommends something you don't understand well enough to know there's a better way to do som…

So here's an analogy. (Yeah, I know, proof by analogy is fraud. But it's going to illustrate the question.) Here's a kid out hoeing rows for corn. He sees someone planting with a tractor, and decides that's the way to go. Someone tells him, "If you get a tractor, you'll never develop the muscles that would make you really great at hoeing." Different analogy: Here's someone trying to learn to paint. They see someone p…

> Here's a kid out hoeing rows for corn. He sees someone planting with a tractor, and decides that's the way to go. Someone tells him, "If you get a tractor, you'll never develop the muscles that would make you really great at hoeing

In this example the idea that losing the muscles that make you great at hoeing" seems kind of like a silly thing to worry about

But I think there's a second order effect here. The kid gets a job driving the tractor instead. He spends his days seated instead of working. His lifestyle is more sedentary. He works just as many hours as before, and he makes about the same as he did before, so he doesn't really see much benefit from the increased productivity of the tractor.

However now he's gaining weight from being more sedentary, losing muscle from not moving his body, developing lower back problems from being seated all day, developing hearing loss from the noisy machinery. His quality of life is now lower, right?

Edit: Yes, there are also health problems from working hard moving dirt all day. You can overwork yourself, no question. It's hard on your body, being in the sun all day is bad for you.

I would argue it's still objectively a physically healthier lifestyle than driving a tractor for hours though.

Edit 2: my point is that I think after driving a tractor for a while, the kid would really struggle to go hoe by hand like he used to, if he ever needed to

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