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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#71

Post by UncleOxidant »

There's some whistling past the graveyard in these comments. "You still need humans for the social element...", "LLMs are bad at debugging", "LLMs lead you astray". And yeah, there's lots of truth in those assertions, but since I started playing with LLMs to generate code a couple of years ago they've made huge strides. I suspect that over the next couple of years the improvements won't be quite as large (Pareto Principle), but I do expect we'll still see some improvement.

Was on r/fpga recently and mentioned that I had had a lot of success recently in getting LLMs to code up first-cut testbenches that allow you to simulate your FPGA/HDL design a lot quicker than if you were to write those testbenches yourself and my comment was met with lots of derision. But they hadn't even given it a try to form their conclusion that it just couldn't work.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#72

Post by klntsky »

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.

I would argue that they are never led astray by chatting, but rather by accepting the projection of their own prompt passed through the model as some kind of truth.

When talking with reasonable people, they have an intuition of what you want even if you don't say it, because there is a lot of non-verbal context. LLMs lack the ability to understand the person, but behave as if they had it.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#74

Post by AlotOfReading »

Unrelated to the LLM discussion, but a hash function function is the wrong construction for the accumulator solution. The hashing part increases the probability that A and B have a collision that leads to a false negative here. Instead, you want a random invertible mapping, which guarantees that no two pointers will "hash" to the same value, while distributing the bits. Splitmix64 is a nice one, and I believe the murmurhash3 finalizer is invertible, as well as some of the xorshift RNGs if you avoid the degenerate zero cycle.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#75

Post by agumonkey »

There's also the subset of devs who are just bored, LLMs will end up as an easier StackOverflow and if the solution is not one script away, then you're back to square one. I already had a few of "well, uhm, chatGPT told me what you said basically".

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#76

Post by Retric »

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".

Progress sure, but the rate the’ve improved hasn’t been particularly fast recently.

Programming has become vastly more efficient in terms of programmer effort over decades, but making some aspects of the job more efficient just means all your effort it spent on what didn’t improve.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#78

Post by [deleted] »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #71

There's some whistling past the graveyard in these comments. "You still need humans for the social element...", "LLMs are bad at debugging", "LLMs lead you astray". And yeah, there's lots of truth in those assertions, but since I started playing with LLMs to generate code a couple of years ago they've made huge strides. I suspect that over the next couple of years the improvements won't be quite as large (Pareto Prin…

[deleted]

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#79

Post by vouaobrasil »

sofal wrote: post #64
sixQuarks wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personally, I am. Lots of unusual skills I have, have already been taken by AI. That's not to say I think I'm in trouble, but I think it's sad I can't apply some of these skills that I learned just a couple of years ago like audio editing because AI does it now. Neither do I want to work as an AI operator, which I find boring and depressing. So, I've just moved onto something else, but it's still discouraging.

Also, so many people said the same thing about chess when the first chess programs came out. "It will never beat an international master." Then, "it will never beat a grandmaster." And Kasparov said, "it would never beat me or Karpov."

Look where we are today. Can humanity adapt? Yes, probably. But that new world IMO is worse than it is today, rather lacking in dignity I'd say.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#80

Post by bgwalter »

am17an wrote: post #67

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…

The Nobel prize is said to have been created partly out of guilt over having invented dynamite, which was obviously used in a destructive manner.

Now we have Geoffrey Hinton getting the prize for contributing to one of the most destructive inventions ever.

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