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Human coders are still better than LLMs
651–660 of 762 posts
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#652Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not producing anything new... If you give it the answer before asking the question, no wonder it can answer. Prompting is to find resonance in the patterns extracted from the training data, which is why it fails spectacularly for exotic programming languages.
When you invent a language and tell it express something in that language, you've not given it the answer before asking the question. That's an utterly bizarre notion. The answer in question never existed before. By your definition humans never produce anything new either, because we always also extrapolate on patterns from our previous knowledge. > it fails spectacularly for exotic programming languages. My experien…
As long as you create the grammar, the language exists. Same if you edit a previous grammar. You're the one creating the language, not the model. It's just generating specific instance.
If you tell someone that multiplying a number by 2 is adding the number to itself, then if this person knows addition, you can't be surprised if it tells you that 9*2 is 18. A small leap in discovery is when the person can extract the pattern and gives you 5*3 is 5+5+5. A much bigger leap is when the person discovers exponent.
But if you take the time to explain each concept....
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#653Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When talking with reasonable people When talking with reasonable people, they will tell you if they don't understand what you're saying. When talking with reasonable people, they will tell you if they don't know the answer or if they are unsure about their answer. LLMs do none of that. They will very happily, and very confidently, spout complete bullshit at you. It is essentially a lotto draw as to whether the answ…
I think you are a couple of years out of date. No longer an issue with the current SOTA reasoning models.
Throwing more parameters at the problem does absolutely nothing to fix the hallucination and bullshit issue.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programmers derided programming languages (too inefficient, too inflexible, too dumbing-down) when assembly was still the default. That phenomenon is at the same time entirely to be expected but also says little about the actual qualities of the new technology.
If you have something that generated 20 lines of assembly that takes 100x times more than the 2 lines of clever instructions you know, you'd have the same stance even if the higher level was easier to use. Then those kind of performance tricks ceases to matter. But reliability still do. And the reasons we use higher and higher level of programming languages is because they increase reliability and simplicity (at the…
You are arguing based on the merits of the technology, which is fine, but wasn't my point. I was arguing that derision tends to happen no matter what, and thus doesn't indicate much about the merits of the technology one way or the other.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#655Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I don’t think we need to get to a point where all jobs are eliminated to start seeing cracks in the system. We already have problems. We’ve left a lot of people behind, we just don’t really care.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#656Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve found them somewhat useful? Not for big things, and not for code for work. But for small personal projects? Yes, helpful.
It's funny how there's a decent % of people at both "LLMs are useless" and "LLMs 3-10x my productivity"
> LLMs 3-10x my productivity
x10 of zero is still zero, I guess.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#657>Gemini was quite impressed about the idea
Like sex professionals, Gemini and co are made to be impressed and have possitive things to say about programming ideas you propose and find your questions "interesting", "deep", "great" and so.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a couple people I work with who clearly don’t have a good understanding of software engineering. They aren’t bad to work with and are in fact great at collaborating and documenting their work, but don’t seem to have the ability to really trace through code and logically understand how it works. Before LLMs it was mostly fine because they just didn’t do that kind of work. But now it’s like a very subtle chao…
Sounds almost like you definitely shouldnt use llms nor those juniors for such an important work. Is it just me or are we heading into a period of explosion of software done, but also a massive drop of its quality? Not uniformly, just a bit of chaotic spread
> those juniors
I'm betting they're the most senior people on the team.
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#659Earlier 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…
> you are ... le LUDDITE
Or maybe they just know the nitty-gritty inherent limitations of technology better than you.
(inb4: "LLMs can't have limitations! Wait a few years and they will solve literally every possible problem!")
Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs
#660Earlier quoted context omitted.
They will also keep going in circles when you rephrase the requirements, unless with every prompt you keep adding to it and mentioning everything they've already suggested that got rejected. While humans occasionally also do this (hey, short memories), LLMs are infuriatingly more prone to it. A typical interaction with an LLM: "Hey, how do I do X in Y?" "That's a great question! A good way to do X in Y is Z!" "No, Z…
It's my experience that once you are in this territory, the LLM is not going to be helpful and you should abandon the effort to get what you want out of it. I can smell blood now when it's wrong; it'll just keep being wrong, cheerfully, confidently.
Yes, to be honest I've also learned to notice when it's stuck in an infinite loop.
It's just frustrating, but when I'm asking it something within my domain of expertise, of course I can notice, and either call it quits or start a new session with a radically different prompt.