4 ms·

I don’t consider myself an expert, but I’ve been programming for the last 6 years, and of those 6 years I’ve spent almost all my spare time programming during t

I don’t consider myself an expert, but I’ve been programming for the last 6 years, and of those 6 years I’ve spent almost all my spare time programming during this period except for a 1 year hiatus. This includes personal projects with a decent amount of users, and 1 sold project. I’m not the best programmer, but I wouldn’t say I’m bad at all. Question to you, have you actually used a leading model like Fable when it was available? I did. I was seriously impressed. I’ll be honest I find it hard to take anyone seriously who says they can program better or faster than a model with those capabilities. That has not been my experience. Architecting - yes people are still better overall. LLMs tend to go with the average middle of the road result. But in terms of output, raw speed, and getting something working? No way am I better than an llm. Happy to be enlightened and told I’m completely wrong. Maybe I am an idiot. That is a possibility. But how about I give you a task, and I give Claude that same task, and we compare results against execution speed? I’ll happily be the judge of that.

bluefirebrand 4mo ago
I mean sure. It can get stuff done faster So can just copying from Stack Overflow, or taking from Open Source repos There have always been reasons why we didn't prefer to do that in the past, but I guess laundering it through LLMs is fine. And that's just the tip of the ethical ice berg High volumes of unvetted code is a bad practice. If the code winds up working out fine then congrats you won the slot machine. It's still a bad practice and very, very stupid to become reliant on And by the way, I had been programming for longer than you have before I even graduated high school, if that matters
- purple-leafy 4mo ago
  But we aren’t discussing ethics here, we are discussing technical capabilities. Who said it’s unvetted? Sure it matters
airport_barfly 3mo ago
People are generally bad at judging themselves, and for some reason even worse about judging their agents' output. I've heard a million people say their LLM workflow produces amazing code. But I have never actually seen the amazing code allegedly being produced. Where are the people saying "I love when my coworkers send me AI-generate PRs"?
- purple-leafy 3mo ago
  “Amazing code”… who cares? that’s like saying a book is only worth reading if each sentence is beautiful To me I couldn’t care less as long as the overall story is coherent, and I care more about the idea density in the book. Lord of the rings is a great book because of the ideas, not because Tolkien is the best writer ever. Same with AI. I couldn’t care less if some of its code is crap, if it is dense with ideas and generally good execution. If it writes crap code sections I can “beautify” myself. Plus LLMs are only going to improve… they have improved so much since ChatGPT 3. It’s insane. And the arguments saying they haven’t can’t be taken in good faith

bluefirebrand 4mo ago

I mean sure. It can get stuff done faster So can just copying from Stack Overflow, or taking from Open Source repos There have always been reasons why we didn't prefer to do that in the past, but I guess laundering it through LLMs is fine. And that's just the tip of the ethical ice berg High volumes of unvetted code is a bad practice. If the code winds up working out fine then congrats you won the slot machine. It's still a bad practice and very, very stupid to become reliant on And by the way, I had been programming for longer than you have before I even graduated high school, if that matters

purple-leafy 4mo ago
But we aren’t discussing ethics here, we are discussing technical capabilities. Who said it’s unvetted? Sure it matters

airport_barfly 3mo ago

People are generally bad at judging themselves, and for some reason even worse about judging their agents' output. I've heard a million people say their LLM workflow produces amazing code. But I have never actually seen the amazing code allegedly being produced. Where are the people saying "I love when my coworkers send me AI-generate PRs"?

purple-leafy 3mo ago
“Amazing code”… who cares? that’s like saying a book is only worth reading if each sentence is beautiful To me I couldn’t care less as long as the overall story is coherent, and I care more about the idea density in the book. Lord of the rings is a great book because of the ideas, not because Tolkien is the best writer ever. Same with AI. I couldn’t care less if some of its code is crap, if it is dense with ideas and generally good execution. If it writes crap code sections I can “beautify” myself. Plus LLMs are only going to improve… they have improved so much since ChatGPT 3. It’s insane. And the arguments saying they haven’t can’t be taken in good faith