Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Human coders are still better than LLMs

antirez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 762 posts

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#81

Post by prmph »

There's something fundamental here.

There is a principle (I forget where I encountered it) that it is not code itself that is valuable, but the knowledge of a specific domain that an engineering team develops as they tackle a project. So code itself is a liability, but the domain knowledge is what is valuable. This makes sense to me and matched my long experience with software projects.

So, if we are entrusting coding to LLMs, how will that value develop? And if we want to use LLMs but at the same time develop the domain acumen, that means we would have to architects things and hand them over to LLMs to implement, thoroughly check what they produce, and generally guide them carefully. In that case they are not saving much time.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#82

Post by ntonozzi »

If you care that much about having correct data you could just do a SHA-256 of the whole thing. Or an HMAC. It would probably be really fast. If you don’t care much you can just do murmur hash of the serialized data. You don’t really need to verify data structure properties if you know the serialized data is correct.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#83

Post by loudmax »

Companies that leverage LLMs and AIs to let their employees be more productive will thrive.

Companies that try to replace their employees with LLMs and AIs will fail.

Unfortunately, all that's in the long run. In the near term, some CEOs and management teams will profit from the short term valuations as they squander their companies' future growth on short-sighted staff cuts.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#84

Post by janalsncm »

Software engineering is in the painful position of needing to explain the value of their job to management. It sucks because now we need to pull out these anecdotes of solving difficult bugs, with the implication that AI can’t handle it.

We have never been good at confronting the follies of management. The Leetcode interview process is idiotic but we go along with it. Ironically LC was one of the first victims of AI, but this is even more of an issue for management that things SWEs solve Leetcodes all day.

Ultimately I believe this is something that will take a cycle for business to figure out by failing. When businesses will figure out that 10 good engineers + AI always beats 5 + AI, it will become table stakes rather than something that replaces people.

Your competitor who didn’t just fire a ton of SWEs? Turns out they can pay for Cursor subscriptions too, and now they are moving faster than you.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#85

Post by hathawsh »

malfist wrote: post #55
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…

That was also one of the challenges during the offshoring craze in the 00s. The offshore teams did not have the power, or knowledge to push back on things and just built and built and built. Sounds very similar to AI right? Probably going to have the same outcome.

The difference is that when AI exhibits behavior like that, you can refine the AI or add more AI layers to correct it. For example, you might create a supervisor AI that evaluates when more requirements are needed before continuing to build, and a code review AI that triggers refinements automatically.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#86

Post by platevoltage »

_tom_ wrote: post #51
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…

For me, it's a bit like pair programming. I have someone to discuss ideas with. Someone to review my code and suggest alternative approaches. Some one that uses different feature than I do, so I learn from them.

This is how I use it too. It's great at quickly answering questions. I find it particularly useful if I have to work with a language of framework that I'm not fully experienced in.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#87

Post by rhubarbtree »

marcosdumay wrote: post #65
smokel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s not true. LLMs are great translators, they can translate ideas to code. And that doesn’t mean it has to be recalling previously seen text.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#88

Post by zonethundery »

No doubt the headline's claim is true, but Claude just wrote a working MCP serving up the last 10 years of my employer's work product. For $13 in api credits.

While technically capable of building it on my own, development is not my day job and there are enough dumb parts of the problem my p(success) hand-writing it would have been abysmal.

With rose-tinted glasses on, maybe LLM's exponentially expand the amount of software written and the net societal benefit of technology.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#90

Post by nixpulvis »

The number one use case for AI for me as a programmer is still help finding functions which are named something I didn't expect as I'm learning a new language/framework/library.

Doing the actual thinking is generally not the part I need too much help with. Though it can replace googling info in domains I'm less familiar with. The thing is, I don't trust the results as much and end up needing to verify it anyways. If anything AI has made this harder, since I feel searching the web for authoritative, expert information has become harder as of late.

Post reply on HN