4 ms·

I still have no idea how people get so productive with the use of LLMs. I've had it maybe cut out some boilerplate for me occasionally but that's about it. So m

I still have no idea how people get so productive with the use of LLMs. I've had it maybe cut out some boilerplate for me occasionally but that's about it. So many times the solutions are wrong or poorly written. It's not useless, but it has certainly not been a 2x improvement.

mattgreenrocks 3y ago
It probably comes down to what your practice of programming is. If it's "search for code snippets that might do what you want, copy/paste, change and adapt until it mostly works," then, yeah, LLMs are going to be a huge time saver. If it's "sit there and think about what you need to do, then write and debug it," then LLMs aren't quite a force-multiplier. Honestly, good auto-complete and decent software architecture are probably at least as effective as an LLM when it comes to composing code. Over-simplifying here, but you get my gist. The latter method still benefits hugely from LLMs when it comes to boilerplate code. And there's still a lot of boilerplate code in programming! Today I was asking ChatGPT if it could scrape info out of HTML, and it autonomously wrote a Python script to do it for me when I asked to work on a larger chunk of data.
- echelon 3y ago
  I'm in the middle of a massive migration. Tables, joins, APIs, and lots of plumbing are changing. (Ordinarily we'd sequence this into phases, but we're moving fast.) I got a 3,000 line change in yesterday without getting bored. All while I'm also juggling a ton of other responsibilities. Tab, yep that's right. Tab, yep, tab yep. Tab, yep. This tech makes a huge difference. It even helped write the tests. I'm not being lazy. I'm a recent convert. Moreover, two of my colleagues are entirely new to Rust, and the time at which they've both been able to learn not only the language fundamentals but the codebase astounds me. They're of course reading all they can, but this tooling makes for one of the best tutors.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- myaccountonhn 3y ago
  Yeah, I found it very useful when I was writing some bash scripts where I don't quite remember the substitution commands but know what I need to do and what a correct solution looks like, so I could just use it to generate the command with a comment. However, I was using it when learning Rust and it was just generating awful inefficient code, but I only discovered that it was inefficient when I read the docs. My manager is in love with LLMs and try to apply them everywhere at work, including providing a summary of the changes in a github PRs. The generated text is many times just plain wrong and so I never read it, and I am scared of people who actually do use it. Someone created a wiki for ocaml filled with a bunch of LLM content, and so much of it contains commands that don't exist or just plain inaccurate information about how OCaml works. I think LLMs seem pretty harmful in these cases and when I read about people using it for learning it horrifies me a bit. So my fear is that it can enable you to be lazy and not understand what you are doing, and it ends up harming you and everyone around you. However, when you understand what you are doing, it can help you generate boilerplate or save you a lookup.
turtlebits 3y ago
ChatGPT for me as been very helpful in languages/tools I'm not comfortable with, or don't want to invest the time to read the docs/ complete learn. The biggest impact for me - Trying to use CLI tools without reading a ton of docs/trial and error - Chrome extensions (for simple tasks like content editing/augmenting, it gets you 90% of the way there) - Drawing an app layout and getting back a Flutter project

mattgreenrocks 3y ago

It probably comes down to what your practice of programming is. If it's "search for code snippets that might do what you want, copy/paste, change and adapt until it mostly works," then, yeah, LLMs are going to be a huge time saver. If it's "sit there and think about what you need to do, then write and debug it," then LLMs aren't quite a force-multiplier. Honestly, good auto-complete and decent software architecture are probably at least as effective as an LLM when it comes to composing code. Over-simplifying here, but you get my gist. The latter method still benefits hugely from LLMs when it comes to boilerplate code. And there's still a lot of boilerplate code in programming! Today I was asking ChatGPT if it could scrape info out of HTML, and it autonomously wrote a Python script to do it for me when I asked to work on a larger chunk of data.

echelon 3y ago
I'm in the middle of a massive migration. Tables, joins, APIs, and lots of plumbing are changing. (Ordinarily we'd sequence this into phases, but we're moving fast.) I got a 3,000 line change in yesterday without getting bored. All while I'm also juggling a ton of other responsibilities. Tab, yep that's right. Tab, yep, tab yep. Tab, yep. This tech makes a huge difference. It even helped write the tests. I'm not being lazy. I'm a recent convert. Moreover, two of my colleagues are entirely new to Rust, and the time at which they've both been able to learn not only the language fundamentals but the codebase astounds me. They're of course reading all they can, but this tooling makes for one of the best tutors.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
myaccountonhn 3y ago
Yeah, I found it very useful when I was writing some bash scripts where I don't quite remember the substitution commands but know what I need to do and what a correct solution looks like, so I could just use it to generate the command with a comment. However, I was using it when learning Rust and it was just generating awful inefficient code, but I only discovered that it was inefficient when I read the docs. My manager is in love with LLMs and try to apply them everywhere at work, including providing a summary of the changes in a github PRs. The generated text is many times just plain wrong and so I never read it, and I am scared of people who actually do use it. Someone created a wiki for ocaml filled with a bunch of LLM content, and so much of it contains commands that don't exist or just plain inaccurate information about how OCaml works. I think LLMs seem pretty harmful in these cases and when I read about people using it for learning it horrifies me a bit. So my fear is that it can enable you to be lazy and not understand what you are doing, and it ends up harming you and everyone around you. However, when you understand what you are doing, it can help you generate boilerplate or save you a lookup.

turtlebits 3y ago

ChatGPT for me as been very helpful in languages/tools I'm not comfortable with, or don't want to invest the time to read the docs/ complete learn. The biggest impact for me - Trying to use CLI tools without reading a ton of docs/trial and error - Chrome extensions (for simple tasks like content editing/augmenting, it gets you 90% of the way there) - Drawing an app layout and getting back a Flutter project