Most of the work software engineers do is not fixing complicated bugs.
Human coders are still better than LLMs
631–640 of 762 posts
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#632Earlier 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…
I think many people just settled in while we had no real technological change for 15 years. Real change, not an update to a web framework.
When I graduated high school, I had never been or knew anyone who had ever been on the internet at all. The internet was this vague "information superhighway" that I didn't know really what to make of.
If you are of a certain age though you would think a pointless update to react was all the change ever coming.
That time is over and we are back to reality.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#633Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's better-than-senior at a some things, but worse-than-junior at a lot of things.
It's more like better-than-senior 99% of the time. Makes mistakes 1% of the time. Most of the 'bad results' I've seen people struggle with ended up being the fault of the human, in the form of horrible context given to the AI or else ambiguous or otherwise flawed prompts. Any skilled developer with a decade of experience can write prompts that return back precisely what we wanted almost every single time. I do it all…
Same!
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#634This 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…
Same. I do rubber duck debugging too and found the LLM to compliment it nicely.
Looking forward for rubber duck shaped hardware AI interfaces to talk to in the future. Im sure somebody will create it
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
You get an answer. If that's the answer, or even the best answer, is impossible to tell without doing the research you're trying to avoid.
By that logic, it's barely worth reading a newspaper or a book. You don't know if they're giving you accurate information without doing all the research you're trying to avoid.
Recognised newspapers will curate by hiring smart, knowledgeable reporters and funding them to get reliable information. Recognised books will be written by a reliably informed author, and reviewed by other reliably informed people. There are no recognised LLMs, and their method of working precludes reliability.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs are a decent search engine a la Google circa 2005. It's been 20 years since that, so I think people have simply forgotten that a search engine can actually be useful as opposed to ad infested SEO sewage sludge. The problem is that the conversational interface, for some reason, seems to turn off the natural skepticism that people have when they use a search engine.
Except a search engine isn't voice controlled, and able to write code for me. Recently I did some tests with coding agents, and being able to translate a full application from AT&T Assembly into Intel Assembly compatible with NASM, in about half an hour of talking with agent, and having the end result actually working with minor tweeks isn't something a "decent search engine a la Google circa 2005." would ever been a…
> being able to translate a full application from AT&T Assembly into Intel Assembly compatible with NASM, [...] isn't something a "decent search engine a la Google circa 2005." would ever been able to achieve
No you would have searched for "difference between at&t assembly and intel assembly", and if not found, the manuals for both and compiling the difference. Then write an awk or perl script to get it done. And if you happens to be good at both assembly versions and awk. I believe that could have been done in less than an hour. Or you could use some vim macros.
> In the past I would have given such a task to a junior dev or intern, to keep them busy somehow, with a bit more tool maturity I have no reason to do it in the future.
The reason to give tasks to junior is to get them to learn more. Or the task needs to be done, but it's not critical. Unless it takes less time to do it than to delegate it to someone else, or you have no junior to guide, it's a good reason to hand out the task to a junior if it will help them grow.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except a search engine isn't voice controlled, and able to write code for me. Recently I did some tests with coding agents, and being able to translate a full application from AT&T Assembly into Intel Assembly compatible with NASM, in about half an hour of talking with agent, and having the end result actually working with minor tweeks isn't something a "decent search engine a la Google circa 2005." would ever been a…
> being able to translate a full application from AT&T Assembly into Intel Assembly compatible with NASM, [...] isn't something a "decent search engine a la Google circa 2005." would ever been able to achieve No you would have searched for "difference between at&t assembly and intel assembly", and if not found, the manuals for both and compiling the difference. Then write an awk or perl script to get it done. And if…
Except that awk or Perl script is something that would take me more than half an hour from idea to production.
There might not exist a junior to give tasks to, if the amount of available juniors is decreased.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#638Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was what promptly led me to turning off Jetbrains AI assistant: the multiline completion was incredibly distracting to my chain of thought, particularly when it would suggest things that looked right but weren't. Stopping and parsing the suggestion to realize if it was right or wrong would completely kill my flow.
With VS Code and Augment (company won't allow any other AI, and I'm not particularly inclined to push - but it did just switch to o4, IIRC), the main benefit is that if I'm fiddling / debugging some code, and need to add some debug statements, it can almost always expand that line successfully for me, following our idiom for debugging - which saves me a few seconds. And it will often suggest the same debugging statem…
Why not use a snippet utility. In every editor I've used, you can have programmable snippets. After it generates the text, you can then skip to the relevant places and even generate new text based on previous entries. Also macros for repetitive edits.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 dis…
For most programming books, the first chapter where they teach you Hello, World is mostly about learning how to install the tooling. Then it goes back to explain variables, conditional,... They rarely throws you into code if you're a beginner.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not just write the code at that point instead of cajoling an AI to do it.
This is the part I don't get about vibe coding: I've written specification documents before. They frequently are longer and denser then the code required to implement them. Typing longer and longer prompts to LLMs to not get what I want seems like a worse experience.
Code is a concise notation for specifications, one that is unambiguous. The reason we write specs in natural language is that it's more easier to alter when the requirements change and easier to read. Also code is tainted by accidental complexities that they're also solving.