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Revenge of the Junior Developer

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Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#81

Post by fragmede »

jcgrillo wrote: post #77
fragmede wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

evidencthe absence of evidence doesn't mean there's no effect

There is no trustworthy evidence that I'm aware of to support the claim that "using an LLM IDE makes developers 5x more effective". Do you disagree? Testimonials don't cut it, because individuals are prone to hysteria, delusions, and just making stuff up. All I'm asking for is a few trustworthy case studies showing unambiguously that it's worth my time and money to pay attention to this genai stuff. That shouldn't be…

What does it even mean to be 5x more effective? Because that's the thing. Testimonials is where we're at because how do you measure "more effective"? I'm not making any claim on a number, 5x 10x? .2x because you have to go back and fix the shitty code it wrote? We don't have a good way to measure programmer productivity. We all know lines of code is ridiculous. And how do you account for how much brain space it takes up. If the LLM lets someone bang out useful code in between meetings all day, vs needing some truly quiet time for some deep deep work to properly get into the right zone... how do you metricize that and show, what, lines of code and interruptions per hour on a graph to have a line that goes up and to the right?

It turns out that it's actually a really hard problem to measure, so, even for a trillion dollar industry, it is hard.

What did you think of that video?

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#82

Post by pluto_modadic »

ramigb wrote: post #51
rocmcd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the true litmus test IMO. If LLMs are so great and make everyone so productive, then where are the results? Where are all of the amazing products being released that otherwise would have required 10x the investment? Shouldn't there be _anything_ we can point to that shows that the "productivity needle" is being moved?

I don't think it makes everyone so productive, tbh! If you really know what you are doing and are willing to burn tokens, it will really take your work to the next level—provided you don’t work with a niche product or language that the models weren’t trained on. If I may use an analogy, it's like what sampling is for music producers. The sample is out there—it’s already a beautiful sample, full of strings and keys, a…

then find a "great" artist willing to cosign that they made something using that AI, vs their own talents.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#83

Post by pluto_modadic »

Kiro wrote: post #69
rocmcd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the true litmus test IMO. If LLMs are so great and make everyone so productive, then where are the results? Where are all of the amazing products being released that otherwise would have required 10x the investment? Shouldn't there be _anything_ we can point to that shows that the "productivity needle" is being moved?

What are you on about? It's happening everywhere, in all companies. It's literally impossible to miss and how to handle the massive increase in code output is becoming a well-known problem. I think it's interesting how the naysayers claim that it's not happening, yet simultaneously worry about the large amount of low-quality code being produced.

lines of code is not equal to features released. especially when you have to diagnose faulty code in production later. So... low quality code is worse than no code.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#84

Post by pluto_modadic »

LightHugger wrote: post #19
tyleo wrote: post #5

I love how new technology becomes like religion. It develops both cult followers and critics. In that lens think the AI cult is more right than the Crypto cult. At least I can use it to do something tangible right now while crypto is still pretty useless after many years. In some sense I think these technologies need the cults and the critics though. It’s good to have people push new things forwards even if everyone…

Cryptocurrency allows people who are otherwise limited by draconian payment platform limitations, puritanical moralists who own credit card companies and such to buy and sell things online without being stopped. It's obviously not a good system but it provides a high effort release valve, a fallback mechanism that hopefully will undermine some of these draconian measures. Lots of people have been helped by the existe…

other countries (e.g. India), just have... built better ordinary payment networks. Or laws for them (e.g., Europe). The US... has regulatory capture by draconian platforms.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#86

Post by felideon »

shove wrote: post #33

I read the whole thing, top to bottom, and by the 80% mark, I still wasn’t sure whether the piece was written in earnest or the sharpest piece of satire I’ve seen in a decade.

On a corporate blog, though, for a product that is competing in this space?

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#87

Post by shove »

felideon wrote: post #86
shove wrote: post #33

I read the whole thing, top to bottom, and by the 80% mark, I still wasn’t sure whether the piece was written in earnest or the sharpest piece of satire I’ve seen in a decade.

On a corporate blog, though, for a product that is competing in this space?

That was the only thing that conclusively gave it away!

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#88

Post by wrs »

LPisGood wrote: post #22
wrs wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the spirit of the argument, but I don’t think you’re taking into account the scale of “typing” we’re talking about now. For example, yesterday I needed a parser for a mini-language. I wrote a grammar — actually not even the formal grammar, just some examples — and what I wanted the AST to look like. I said “write the tokenizer”, and it did. I told it to tweak a few things and write tests. It did. I told…

This is a cool use case that probably saved you some time, but writing a recursive descent parser is something freshman CS students do for a lab assignment. It isn’t exactly breaking new ground or doing anything you couldn’t find with a quick google search.

You want me to do a Google search for a parser for the language that I just invented?

If you have a parser generator tool that can go from zero to parser based on a few examples rather than a grammar, I’d love to hear about it.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#89

Post by kuschku »

wrs wrote: post #88
LPisGood wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a cool use case that probably saved you some time, but writing a recursive descent parser is something freshman CS students do for a lab assignment. It isn’t exactly breaking new ground or doing anything you couldn’t find with a quick google search.

You want me to do a Google search for a parser for the language that I just invented? If you have a parser generator tool that can go from zero to parser based on a few examples rather than a grammar, I’d love to hear about it.

> If you have a parser generator tool that can go from zero to parser based on a few examples rather than a grammar, I’d love to hear about it.

That's the part where the LLM would be useful. Turn the examples into a grammar, verify the grammar, and use a parser generator for the rest.

You know the code does what it should and you get there in minutes.

Re: Revenge of the Junior Developer

#90

Post by wrs »

kuschku wrote: post #89
wrs wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want me to do a Google search for a parser for the language that I just invented? If you have a parser generator tool that can go from zero to parser based on a few examples rather than a grammar, I’d love to hear about it.

> If you have a parser generator tool that can go from zero to parser based on a few examples rather than a grammar, I’d love to hear about it. That's the part where the LLM would be useful. Turn the examples into a grammar, verify the grammar, and use a parser generator for the rest. You know the code does what it should and you get there in minutes.

I'm pretty sure it could have done that equally easily, but this grammar is small enough that a parser generator is overkill. (I made that decision before I asked the LLM to write the parser.)
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