3 ms·

I used to do that in simpler days. I'd add a link to where I copied it from so we could reference it if there were problems. This was for relatively small proje

• jennyholzer2 10mo ago
  > I'd add a link to where I copied it from LLMs can't do this. Your code is unambiguously better than any LLM code if you can comment a link to the stackoverflow post you copied it from.
  • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 10mo ago
    > Your code is unambiguously better than any LLM code if you can comment a link to the stackoverflow post you copied it from. This is not a truism. "My" code might come from an LLM and that's fine if I can be reasonably confident it works. I might try to gain that confidence by testing the code and reading it to understand what it's doing. It is also true of blog post code, regardless of how I refer to the code; if I link to the blog post, it's because it does a better job of explaining than I ever could in code comments. Whether LLMs make one more productive is hard to measure but it seems to be missing the point to write this. The point is, including the code is a choice and one should be mindful of it, no matter the code's origin. At that point, this comes off like you just have something to prove; there doesn't seem to be a reason not to use the LLM code if you know it works and you know why it works.
    • wizzwizz4 10mo ago
      Believing you know how it works and why it works is not the same as that actually being the case. If the code has no author (in that it's been plagiarised by a statistical process that introduces errors), there's nowhere to go if you realise "oops, I didn't understand that as well as I had thought!".
      • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 10mo ago
        > If the code has no author ... there's nowhere to go if you realise "oops, I didn't understand that as well as I had thought!" That's also true if I author the code myself; I can't go to anyone for help with it, so if it doesn't work then I have to figure out why. > Believing you know how it works and why it works is not the same as that actually being the case. My series of accidental successes producing working code is honestly starting to seem like real skill and experience at this point. Not sure what else you'd call it.
        • wizzwizz4 10mo ago
          > so if it doesn't work then I have to figure out why. But it's built on top of things that are understood. If it doesn't work, then either: • You didn't understand the problem fully, so the approach you were using is wrong. • You didn't understand the language (library, etc) correctly, so the computer didn't grasp your meaning. • The code you wrote isn't the code you intended to write. This is a much more tractable situation to be in than "nobody knows what the code means, or has a mental model for how it's supposed to operate", which is the norm for a sufficiently-large LLM-produced codebase. > My series of accidental successes That somewhat misses the point. To write working code, you must have some understanding of the relationship between your intention and your output. LLMs have a poor-to-nonexistent understanding of this relationship, which they cover up with the ability to regurgitate (permutations of) a large corpus of examples – but this does not grant them the ability to operate outside the domain of those examples. LLM-generated codebases very much do not lie within that domain: they lack the clues and signs of underlying understanding that human readers and (to an extent) LLMs rely on. Worse, the LLMs do replicate those signals, but they don't encode anything coherent in the signal. Unless you are very used to critically analysing LLM output, this can be highly misleading. (It reminds me of how chess grandmasters blunder, and struggle to even remember, unreachable board positions.) Believing you know how LLM-generated code works, and why it works, is not the same as that actually being the case – in a very real sense that is different to that of code with human authors.
          • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 10mo ago
  • newsoftheday 10mo ago
    Agreed on the first part for sure since an LLM is the computer/software version of a blender. So, I'm agreed on the second part too then.