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A traditional IDE isn’t writing code for you.
by otterley 2mo ago
A traditional IDE isn’t writing code for you.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- DarmokTanagra 2mo agocode generator ide plugins have been around for a long long time
- otterley 2mo agoWhich ones are you thinking of? Were they actually generating code, or were they loading in templates or mechanically building interface stubs?
- DarmokTanagra 2mo agoLike "code generator IDE plugins". There are hundreds of them for just about every IDE you can think of. I can't tell if this is a serious question or not, but metaprogramming/generators are decades old concepts that have been common features of basically every IDE since the 90s.
- otterley 2mo agoThat’s not what we’re talking about, though. That’s mechanical transformation, and isn’t the same thing as code that’s generated on demand from scratch, based on plain-language intent. Surely you know the difference, right? I assume you’ve used LLMs to generate code by now?
- 0x000xca0xfe 2mo agoAnd what is the good old autocomplete feature? Do you attribute it authorship, too? Is a series of matrix multiplications on a token vector not a mechanical transformation? Where is the point where you start to anthropomorphize it?
- otterley 2mo agoThat’s a great question, and is why we have these debates, and have courts to adjudicate disputes. I don’t have all the answers, but the gap between these different behaviors seems pretty wide to me. Autocomplete doesn’t really work until you start typing. The fact that my phone recognizes that I’m starting to type a word and the IDE offers the most statistically likely choice for me to accept doesn’t make those words its own. Same with autocomplete on a phone or in a word processor when entering sentences. FWIW the Copyright Office, for its part, recognizes that AI generated code is mechanically generated and its opinion is that it’s not copyrightable. But that’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about attribution and when it becomes important. To me the metaprogramming/codegen case is different because of the nature of the mechanism, particularly if you wrote the inputs that the IDE transformed on your behalf.
- DarmokTanagra 2mo agoSo “create an express app boilerplate, make no mistakes” requires attribution but “npx express-generator myapp” does not? The bar for “writes code for you” is very low.
- otterley 2mo agoThat’s my opinion, yes. What, specifically, do you have against it?
- DarmokTanagra 2mo agoNothing at all, I just think its a rather arbitrary distinction, especially when you consider heuristic methods like autocomplete that have been around for ages.
- otterley 2mo agoLine-drawing exercises are frequently difficult. :-)
- verdverm 2mo agoIt's still code generation, a compiler also generates code, why do you sound like you are arguing LLMs are the only path to generating code now?