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> especially if you're doing varied, novel work. What do you mean by that? In my experience they mostly help when you are doing mainstream, well-trodden work f

by layer8 2y ago

> especially if you're doing varied, novel work. What do you mean by that? In my experience they mostly help when you are doing mainstream, well-trodden work for which a company’s/project’s/domain’s inside knowledge isn’t needed. Maybe you mean the latter by “novel”?

JohnMakin 2y ago
Gluing together react components /s
furyofantares 2y ago
Novel to the programmer. Even the best programmers have very narrow skills relative to the whole field. Yeah, I've used 20+ languages and hundreds of technologies and a variety of different types of product and can pick things up quickly. But it's still a drop in the bucket of technologies you can use and types of problem you can solve. Programmer skills are deep but narrow. LLM skills are shallow but wide. It's an excellent complement for any programmer working outside their deep+narrow expertise.
llm_nerd 2y ago
>What do you mean by that? Varied and novel to the programmer. If you're doing the same thing day in and day out it probably isn't much use. If you're like many programmers and you're jumping between libraries and languages and platforms and APIs and domains and spheres, it's immensely helpful. >doing mainstream, well-trodden work for which a company’s/project’s/domain’s inside knowledge isn’t needed A core disconnect in this discussion is that many people seem to be arguing from the position of "I tried to generate whole solutions with these tools and it failed, so it's useless". Everything is well-trodden. One of the commentators in here, who declares themselves a unique snowflake where these tools are useless, does "sockets with encryption and messaging", which is some of the most well-trodden ground in this domain. Everything is glue. Everything is a lot of relatively simple things strung together. And for all of those, portions are helped and accelerated with these tools.
- layer8 2y ago
  Everything isn’t well-trodden. I’m mostly doing non-glue, heavily domain knowledge-based work. The main issue I’m running into is that explaining the domain and context to the LLM will take significantly more time than just doing the work myself, and also that parts of the necessary knowledge and most of the source code are NDA-protected, so only a local LLM would do.
  - llm_nerd 2y ago
    Sigh. Everything is extremely well-trodden at the code level. You're taking some inputs and generating some outputs. You're calling some functions. You're manipulating some strings or lists or sets. You're sorting some things or filtering things. You're building a client to a given API. You're doing some messaging and some encryption. I guarantee that your code isn't remotely as unique or novel as you think it is. Of course on here everyone is 240lbs, 6'2" and benches 350, and their magically novel, super unique code is just too secret. So everyone's special. If you had to explain the domain and context to these tools, you might be using them wrong.
    - Smaug123 2y ago
      "It's all just code, how hard can it be, and your NDAs don't apply" is certainly a take, but some people do actually solve problems whose solutions aren't already on the Internet and are forbidden from exfiltrating code! The fact that you don't solve such problems and are not bound by such NDAs is not a huge piece of evidence, to be honest. Can you imagine even in principle a piece of evidence that would convince you otherwise?
      - llm_nerd 2y ago
        Who said that NDAs don't apply? If you need to strawman to make an argument, just save the bits and skip doing it. And yes, in the end all code distills down to shit that is very similar to the countless billions of lines of code on the internet. Everything -- every single project that anyone on this site is working on -- is a bunch of glued together shit where 90% (more like 99% Probably 99.9%) of it is in common with code seen in countless other projects. Utterly regardless of domain or business or project specific uniqueness. Someone would have to be profoundly incompetent to not realize this. Again, I seem to arguing with people who think that using a tool means feeding it their whole projects and having it rewrite it in Rust or something. In reality a programmer could yield immense value from such tools having a) given it zero lines of their code, b) used zero lines of the code it generated. This isn't a difficult concept, but I'm going to continue getting insane responses by all of the unique people who work on the amazingly unique situations where instead of sorting from A-Z, they sort from Z-A!

by layer8 2y ago

JohnMakin 2y ago

Gluing together react components /s

furyofantares 2y ago

Novel to the programmer. Even the best programmers have very narrow skills relative to the whole field. Yeah, I've used 20+ languages and hundreds of technologies and a variety of different types of product and can pick things up quickly. But it's still a drop in the bucket of technologies you can use and types of problem you can solve. Programmer skills are deep but narrow. LLM skills are shallow but wide. It's an excellent complement for any programmer working outside their deep+narrow expertise.

llm_nerd 2y ago

>What do you mean by that? Varied and novel to the programmer. If you're doing the same thing day in and day out it probably isn't much use. If you're like many programmers and you're jumping between libraries and languages and platforms and APIs and domains and spheres, it's immensely helpful. >doing mainstream, well-trodden work for which a company’s/project’s/domain’s inside knowledge isn’t needed A core disconnect in this discussion is that many people seem to be arguing from the position of "I tried to generate whole solutions with these tools and it failed, so it's useless". Everything is well-trodden. One of the commentators in here, who declares themselves a unique snowflake where these tools are useless, does "sockets with encryption and messaging", which is some of the most well-trodden ground in this domain. Everything is glue. Everything is a lot of relatively simple things strung together. And for all of those, portions are helped and accelerated with these tools.

layer8 2y ago
Everything isn’t well-trodden. I’m mostly doing non-glue, heavily domain knowledge-based work. The main issue I’m running into is that explaining the domain and context to the LLM will take significantly more time than just doing the work myself, and also that parts of the necessary knowledge and most of the source code are NDA-protected, so only a local LLM would do.
- llm_nerd 2y ago
  Sigh. Everything is extremely well-trodden at the code level. You're taking some inputs and generating some outputs. You're calling some functions. You're manipulating some strings or lists or sets. You're sorting some things or filtering things. You're building a client to a given API. You're doing some messaging and some encryption. I guarantee that your code isn't remotely as unique or novel as you think it is. Of course on here everyone is 240lbs, 6'2" and benches 350, and their magically novel, super unique code is just too secret. So everyone's special. If you had to explain the domain and context to these tools, you might be using them wrong.
  - Smaug123 2y ago
    "It's all just code, how hard can it be, and your NDAs don't apply" is certainly a take, but some people do actually solve problems whose solutions aren't already on the Internet and are forbidden from exfiltrating code! The fact that you don't solve such problems and are not bound by such NDAs is not a huge piece of evidence, to be honest. Can you imagine even in principle a piece of evidence that would convince you otherwise?
    - llm_nerd 2y ago
      Who said that NDAs don't apply? If you need to strawman to make an argument, just save the bits and skip doing it. And yes, in the end all code distills down to shit that is very similar to the countless billions of lines of code on the internet. Everything -- every single project that anyone on this site is working on -- is a bunch of glued together shit where 90% (more like 99% Probably 99.9%) of it is in common with code seen in countless other projects. Utterly regardless of domain or business or project specific uniqueness. Someone would have to be profoundly incompetent to not realize this. Again, I seem to arguing with people who think that using a tool means feeding it their whole projects and having it rewrite it in Rust or something. In reality a programmer could yield immense value from such tools having a) given it zero lines of their code, b) used zero lines of the code it generated. This isn't a difficult concept, but I'm going to continue getting insane responses by all of the unique people who work on the amazingly unique situations where instead of sorting from A-Z, they sort from Z-A!