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It's a junior engineer that doesn't learn - they make the same mistakes even after being corrected the second that falls out their context window (even often wi
by kimixa 1y ago
It's a junior engineer that doesn't learn - they make the same mistakes even after being corrected the second that falls out their context window (even often with "corrections" still there...), they struggle to abstract those categories of mistakes to avoid making similar ones in the future, and (by the looks of it) will never be "the senior". "Hiring a Junior" should really be seen as an investment more than immediate output.
I keep being told that $(WHATEVER MODEL) is the greatest thing ever, but every time I actually try to use them they're of limited (but admittedly non-zero) usefulness. There's only so many breathless blogs or comments I can read that just don't mesh with the reality I personally see.
Maybe it's sector? I generally work on Systems/OS/Drivers, large code bases in languages like C, C++ and Rust. Most larger than context windows even before you look at things like API documentation. Even as a "search and summarizer" tool I've found it completely wrong in enough cases to be functionally worthless as the time required to correct and check the output isn't a saving. But they can be handy for "autocompletion+" - like "here's a similar existing block of code, now do the same but with (changes)".
They generally seem pretty good at being like a template engine on non-templated code, so thing like renaming/refactoring or similar structure recognition can be handy. Which I suspect might also explain some of those breathless blog posts - I've seen loads which say "Any non-coder can make a simple app in seconds!" - but you could already do that, there's a million "Simple App Tutorial" codebases that would match whatever license you want, copy one, change the name at the top and you're 99% of the way to the "Wow Magic End Result!" often described.