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LLMs perform well on small tasks that are well defined. This definition matches almost every task that a student will work on in school leading to an overestima

by lumost 2y ago

LLMs perform well on small tasks that are well defined. This definition matches almost every task that a student will work on in school leading to an overestimation of LLM capabiity. LLMs cannot decide what to work on, or manage large bodies of work/code easily. They do not understand the risk of making a change and deploying it to production, or play nicely in autonomous settings. There is going to be a massive amount of work that goes into solving these problems. Followed by a massive amount of work to solve the next set of problems. Software/ML engineers will have work to do for as long as these problems remain unsolved.

fakedang 2y ago
Truth is, LLMs are going to make the coding part super easy, and the ceiling for shit coders like me has just gotten a lot lower because I can just ask it to deliver clean code to me. I feel like the software developer version of an investment banking Managing Director asking my analyst to build me a pitch deck an hour before the meeting.
- dhdisjsbshsus 2y ago
  You mentioned in another comment you’ve used AI to write clean code, but here you mention you’re a “shit coder”. How do you know it’s giving you clean code?
  - fakedang 2y ago
    I know the fundamentals but I'm a noob when it comes to coding with React or NextJS. Code that comes out from Claude is often segregated and modularized properly so that even I can follow the logic of the code, even if not the language and its syntax. If there's an issue with the code, causing it to fail at runtime, I am still able to debug it appropriately with my minimal language of JS. If any codebase can let me do that, then in my books that's a great codebase. Compare that to Gpt 4o which gives me a massive chunk of unsorted gibberish that I have to pore through and organize myself. Besides, most IBD MDs don't know if they're getting correct numbers either :).
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Has the coding part ever been hard? When is the last time you faced a hard coding challenege? What is hard is gather requirements, dealing with unexpected production issues, scaling, security, fixing obscure bugs and integration with other systems. The coding part is about 10% of my job and the easiest part by far.
fsndz 2y ago
Exactly, LLMs are not near ready to fully replace software engineers or any kind of knowledge workers. But they are increasingly useful tools that is true. https://www.lycee.ai/blog/ai-replace-software-engineer https://www.lycee.ai/blog/ai-replace-software-engineer
spaceman_2020 2y ago
Careers are 30 years long Can you confidently say that an LLM won’t be better than an average 22 year old coder within these 30 years?
- HappMacDonald 2y ago
  Careers have failed to be 30 years long for a lot longer than 30 years now. That's one of the reasons that 4-year colleges have drastically lost their ROI, the other blade of those scissors being the stupendously rising tuition. AI is nothing but one more layer in the constantly growing substrate of computing technology a coder has to learn how to integrate into their toolbelts. Just like the layers that came before it: mobile, virtualization, networking, etc.
  - snowwrestler 2y ago
    Careers are still longer than 30 years. How many people do you think are retiring at 48 or 51 years old these days? It’s a small minority. Most people work through 65: a career of about 45 years or more.
    - dmoy 2y ago
      Right but most people don't stick a single career anymore. An individual career is <30 yrs, and the average person will have >1 of them. It's not as out there as e.g. this article (https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704206804575468162805877990 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704206804575468...) - 7 careers is probably a crazy overestimate. But it is >1.
- taco_emoji 2y ago
  yes, because this is still glorified autocomplete
  - spaceman_2020 2y ago
    the average coder is worse than an autocomplete Too many people here have spent time in elite corporations and don't realize how mediocre the bottom 50th percentile of coding talent is

by lumost 2y ago

fakedang 2y ago

Truth is, LLMs are going to make the coding part super easy, and the ceiling for shit coders like me has just gotten a lot lower because I can just ask it to deliver clean code to me. I feel like the software developer version of an investment banking Managing Director asking my analyst to build me a pitch deck an hour before the meeting.

dhdisjsbshsus 2y ago
You mentioned in another comment you’ve used AI to write clean code, but here you mention you’re a “shit coder”. How do you know it’s giving you clean code?
- fakedang 2y ago
  I know the fundamentals but I'm a noob when it comes to coding with React or NextJS. Code that comes out from Claude is often segregated and modularized properly so that even I can follow the logic of the code, even if not the language and its syntax. If there's an issue with the code, causing it to fail at runtime, I am still able to debug it appropriately with my minimal language of JS. If any codebase can let me do that, then in my books that's a great codebase. Compare that to Gpt 4o which gives me a massive chunk of unsorted gibberish that I have to pore through and organize myself. Besides, most IBD MDs don't know if they're getting correct numbers either :).
bamboozled 2y ago
Has the coding part ever been hard? When is the last time you faced a hard coding challenege? What is hard is gather requirements, dealing with unexpected production issues, scaling, security, fixing obscure bugs and integration with other systems. The coding part is about 10% of my job and the easiest part by far.

fsndz 2y ago

Exactly, LLMs are not near ready to fully replace software engineers or any kind of knowledge workers. But they are increasingly useful tools that is true. https://www.lycee.ai/blog/ai-replace-software-engineer https://www.lycee.ai/blog/ai-replace-software-engineer

spaceman_2020 2y ago

Careers are 30 years long Can you confidently say that an LLM won’t be better than an average 22 year old coder within these 30 years?

HappMacDonald 2y ago
Careers have failed to be 30 years long for a lot longer than 30 years now. That's one of the reasons that 4-year colleges have drastically lost their ROI, the other blade of those scissors being the stupendously rising tuition. AI is nothing but one more layer in the constantly growing substrate of computing technology a coder has to learn how to integrate into their toolbelts. Just like the layers that came before it: mobile, virtualization, networking, etc.
- snowwrestler 2y ago
  Careers are still longer than 30 years. How many people do you think are retiring at 48 or 51 years old these days? It’s a small minority. Most people work through 65: a career of about 45 years or more.
  - dmoy 2y ago
    Right but most people don't stick a single career anymore. An individual career is <30 yrs, and the average person will have >1 of them. It's not as out there as e.g. this article (https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704206804575468162805877990 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704206804575468...) - 7 careers is probably a crazy overestimate. But it is >1.
taco_emoji 2y ago
yes, because this is still glorified autocomplete
- spaceman_2020 2y ago
  the average coder is worse than an autocomplete Too many people here have spent time in elite corporations and don't realize how mediocre the bottom 50th percentile of coding talent is