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Nobody in their right mind gives up control or lets the LLM decide what's best. They take the output of the LLM as a starting point, changing it where necessary
by kmoser 2y ago
Nobody in their right mind gives up control or lets the LLM decide what's best. They take the output of the LLM as a starting point, changing it where necessary to accomplish their goals.
This is no different than starting with boilerplate code, e.g. from a tutorial or manual or other project (or, heaven forbid, an Internet search), and changing it for your specific needs.
As for imprecision, a developer is perfectly capable of writing imprecise, ambiguous, or just plain buggy code by themselves. If you think your code is better than that produced by an LLM (and I'm not saying it isn't), then by all means use it. But the fact is that an LLM, in some cases, can produce code better and/or faster than it would take some people to write themselves who don't want to spend several minutes or hours stumbling through finding the exact syntax or algorithm, let alone Googling for a good starting point.
As for the non-determinism that many people are decrying, this is no different from Googling and finding several examples, each of which is written for a particular use case, none of which ever seem to match yours exactly. Caveat emptor if you simply cut and paste without reading, just as with code produced by an LLM.
- danjl 2y agoAs I said, the LLM will be a good replacement for the simplest cases. The behaviors you describe are far more common among junior programmers working on simple apps.
- BeetleB 2y ago> The behaviors you describe are far more common among junior programmers working on simple apps. Or among expert programmers who need to code in something out of their domain for a small portion of their job. Suppose you suddenly are required to write a VBA macro for Excel for your job. It's a one off task - not something you'll do repeatedly. Do you prefer learning VBA for Excel and crafting a solution or asking the LLM and verifying it's solution by looking at the docs? Hint: If you use the macro recorder in Excel and inspect the code you are closer to the LLM end of the spectrum.
- fuzztester 2y agothis is one of the most perspicacious comments I have ever read about llms, with the disclaimer that i have not read a large number of comments on the subject. I have read some however. however, referring to the first paragraph of the comment above, the problem is that many people are not in their right minds :)