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There's no silver bullet. It is amazing how in our field we repeatedly forget this simple advice from Fred Brooks. In my experience, LLMs are way more useful
by elzbardico 1y ago
There's no silver bullet.
It is amazing how in our field we repeatedly forget this simple advice from Fred Brooks.
In my experience, LLMs are way more useful for coding and less problem-prone when you use them without exaggerated expectations and understand that it was trained on buggy code, and that of course it is going to generate buggy code. Because almost all code is buggy.
Don't delegate design for it, use functional decomposition, do your homework and then use LLMs to eliminate toil, to deal with the boring stuff, to guide you on unfamiliar territory. But LLMs don't eliminate the need for you to understand the code that goes with your name. And usually, if you think a piece of LLM generated code is perfect, remember that maybe the defects are there, but you need to improve your own knowledge and skills to find it. Be always suspicious, don't trust it blindly.
- esafak 1y agoI agree with what you said except the delegation of design, if by which you mean architecture, because I find that it is good at that too. When it comes to design I ask it to describe it, and iterate at a high level before proceeding to implementation. Just as one would in real life.
- infecto 1y agoI tend to agree with you with the caveat that I believe it’s important to full understand what’s being built. Not suggesting you think either way.
- infecto 1y agoWish this was higher up. I fully agree and it’s the same camp for me. I am not sure why but the vast majority either treat it as a magic bullet or says it’s pointless and nothing but flaws. It’s not perfect it might write buggy code but I write buggy code too and would guess most engineers do. It takes a lot of the menial tasks out of the way. Sure I might spruce up some of the code it writes but why is that a deal breaker?