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> I have to wonder if people are just that bad at programming or if they have a financial incentive here. I have similar feelings to you, but I want to be care

by norir 2y ago

> I have to wonder if people are just that bad at programming or if they have a financial incentive here. I have similar feelings to you, but I want to be careful about making assumptions. That being said, I see so many people making hyperbolic claims about the productivity gains of llms and a huge amount (though not all) of the time, they are doing low value work that betrays their inexperience and/or lack of ability. I have yet to see a good example of where an llm invented a novel solution to an important problem in programming. Until that happens -- and I'm not saying it won't -- I remain extremely skeptical about the grandiose claims. This is particularly true of the companies selling llm products who make vague claims about productivity benefits. Who is more productive, the person who solves the most leet code problems in a month or the person who implements a new compiler in the same time frame? The former will almost surely have the most lines of code, but they have done nothing of direct value. I point this out because of how often productivity is measured in lines of code and/or time to complete a problem with a known solution. So for me, when people brag about how much more productive they are with llms, I wonder, ok, well what are you building? I feel like llms are as likely going to make people build fragile bridges to nowhere at scale as anything truly revolutionary.

creesch 2y ago
I am not expecting novel solutions from LLMs. I purely use them as a tool in my tool belt. Some examples: Deciphering spaghetti code: LLMs generally are pretty good at picking apart code blocks and generally explaining the functional parts. A while ago I was dealing with code that had lots of methods on single lines with tons of conditions. I put in in chatGPT, asked it to go over it and it gave me a point by point explanation of all the logic in there. Again, I don't expect it to be perfect here, it doesn't need to be. The way my mind works once I have the explanation I can much easier go to the single line mess and follow it along. If chatGPT messed up I will see that, but I will also be much further along already with deciphering as I would have been doing it manually. Getting a quick start on technology, specifically if it is something I know I will only need to know once it helps me avoid tedious google searches. Instead I get a pretty decent rundown of whatever it is I need to know as well as some basics. In short, I don't they are miraculous technologies transforming my work. But, they are pretty good at removing some of the more tedious tasks letting me focus on other things. So they do make me more productive in that aspect.
gandalfgreybeer 2y ago
> an llm invented a novel solution to an important problem in programming. This will likely not happen and is a horrible benchmark for productivity. The advantage of using LLMs as a partner for coding is that I myself will have more time to generate “novel solutions” since a lot of the low level stuff that I still need to write can be done in less than half the time. I never trust it to write code I can’t write for myself and things I can’t make tests or verify. It’s not about generating more lines of code but having more time to think of the more mentally demanding stuff. It’s like having a junior developer that can work really fast but I will still need to check what it does. As a very personal benchmark, at work I know how much time it takes me to build repeating things from scratch that can’t be automated. By my estimate, having the LLM saves me around an hour or two of coding a day. That doesn’t replace my time but those 20-40 hours a month of time saved is worth the 20 bucks on average I pay for it. Tldr; it won’t make anything novel but it gives me more time to make things that are
koonsolo 2y ago
If you are an expert in your field and are working on the same project day in day out, I don't think LLM's will offer you much. If you are a one man shop, where you have to work with: Javascript, Typescript, Haxe, PHP, bash, WordPress, BuddyPress, npm, Selenium, Playwright, Jest, Kha, Three.js, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, Nextjs, SQL, ... . And that is all next to marketing, devops, managing freelancers, ... . Well, then an LLM is a super fast and super cheap junior of everything that can quickly create something you need in seconds. Edit: Let me make it more concrete with an example of the previous days. I registered a new domain and wanted to already have a quick landing page on there that sends people to a certain url. It would already use Nextjs & tailwind so that I can test out the setup on the server. So I wanted to generate this quick landing page. I have a few options: 1. Do it myself, which will take some time digging into the css to style things. 2. Hire a freelancer, which is more expensive, and would take up more time. 3. Let ChatGPT generate the initial version in 3 seconds, I can suggest some changes and get a full reply in 3 second. Same for a lot of other things that I do. Will ChatGPT help me out in a big, complex application that I'm writing? Probably not. But it sure has its uses for a lot of small things.

by norir 2y ago

creesch 2y ago

I am not expecting novel solutions from LLMs. I purely use them as a tool in my tool belt. Some examples: Deciphering spaghetti code: LLMs generally are pretty good at picking apart code blocks and generally explaining the functional parts. A while ago I was dealing with code that had lots of methods on single lines with tons of conditions. I put in in chatGPT, asked it to go over it and it gave me a point by point explanation of all the logic in there. Again, I don't expect it to be perfect here, it doesn't need to be. The way my mind works once I have the explanation I can much easier go to the single line mess and follow it along. If chatGPT messed up I will see that, but I will also be much further along already with deciphering as I would have been doing it manually. Getting a quick start on technology, specifically if it is something I know I will only need to know once it helps me avoid tedious google searches. Instead I get a pretty decent rundown of whatever it is I need to know as well as some basics. In short, I don't they are miraculous technologies transforming my work. But, they are pretty good at removing some of the more tedious tasks letting me focus on other things. So they do make me more productive in that aspect.

gandalfgreybeer 2y ago

> an llm invented a novel solution to an important problem in programming. This will likely not happen and is a horrible benchmark for productivity. The advantage of using LLMs as a partner for coding is that I myself will have more time to generate “novel solutions” since a lot of the low level stuff that I still need to write can be done in less than half the time. I never trust it to write code I can’t write for myself and things I can’t make tests or verify. It’s not about generating more lines of code but having more time to think of the more mentally demanding stuff. It’s like having a junior developer that can work really fast but I will still need to check what it does. As a very personal benchmark, at work I know how much time it takes me to build repeating things from scratch that can’t be automated. By my estimate, having the LLM saves me around an hour or two of coding a day. That doesn’t replace my time but those 20-40 hours a month of time saved is worth the 20 bucks on average I pay for it. Tldr; it won’t make anything novel but it gives me more time to make things that are

koonsolo 2y ago

If you are an expert in your field and are working on the same project day in day out, I don't think LLM's will offer you much. If you are a one man shop, where you have to work with: Javascript, Typescript, Haxe, PHP, bash, WordPress, BuddyPress, npm, Selenium, Playwright, Jest, Kha, Three.js, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, Nextjs, SQL, ... . And that is all next to marketing, devops, managing freelancers, ... . Well, then an LLM is a super fast and super cheap junior of everything that can quickly create something you need in seconds. Edit: Let me make it more concrete with an example of the previous days. I registered a new domain and wanted to already have a quick landing page on there that sends people to a certain url. It would already use Nextjs & tailwind so that I can test out the setup on the server. So I wanted to generate this quick landing page. I have a few options: 1. Do it myself, which will take some time digging into the css to style things. 2. Hire a freelancer, which is more expensive, and would take up more time. 3. Let ChatGPT generate the initial version in 3 seconds, I can suggest some changes and get a full reply in 3 second. Same for a lot of other things that I do. Will ChatGPT help me out in a big, complex application that I'm writing? Probably not. But it sure has its uses for a lot of small things.