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I spent 22 years as an engineer split between MS and Apple. SOTA LLMs can write code just as good as most human engineers. I expect to see the "LLMs are just ne

I spent 22 years as an engineer split between MS and Apple. SOTA LLMs can write code just as good as most human engineers. I expect to see the "LLMs are just next token predictors!" crap on Reddit... not HN.

jeltz 11d ago
LLMs produce pretty crappy code but they are very useful tools for protyping, code search and finding bugs. Maybe LLMs in the future will be able to write good code but they are very far from that right now.
- basilikum 11d ago
  Perhaps it would be useful if both of you could provide examples of supposedly good and bad code – the latter being the result of a genuine effort to produce good code with state of the art models. Just asserting that LLM code is good or bad ends in a yes - no - yes - no back and forth circle immediately.
  - LatencyKills 11d ago
    I just used an LLM (along with my decades of operating system development experience) to create a macOS tool [0] that lets me see through windows, instead of having to continually command+tab between windows. The solution required reverse engineering and internals knowledge that most human engineers don't even have. The question is no longer "Can an LLM write code?". It can. The problem is that certain humans refuse to put in the effort required to properly utilize these tools. [0] https://imgur.com/a/2CUEjmA https://imgur.com/a/2CUEjmA
    - pessimizer 11d ago
      LLMs have been good at knowing what's in the manual from v1.0. Super good at that. Pretty good translators. Pretty good at doing things that have been done a million times before, like your CRUD app. Super mediocre at everything else. LLMs as things that know what's in the manual are AAA+. Extremely helpful. Very good at making a rough draft of something filled with a lot of stupid mistakes and no new abstractions. That's what your transparent window thing is. Something that you could never ship, is probably too big and doing senseless things for no intelligible reason, and definitely has bizarre bugs.
      - LatencyKills 11d ago
        What in the world are you talking about? I was literally an senior engineer on the Windows Kernel team, the Visual Studio team, and the Xcode team at Apple. This application, named Seymore, is being evaluated for purchase by several tech companies. (It helps having good industry contacts) There was a ton of interesting engineering required to make this work at 60 fps+ without resorting to hacks or using private APIs. Most macOS engineers wouldn't even know where to start. I've shipped code that is used by billions of people and all you just did was spew a bunch of bullshit. As someone who has built their own LLM from scratch, I have an extremely good idea of what they can and can't do. If you don't know how to use these tools, you'll end up with crap. If you DO know how to use them, they are incredibly useful.
        tuesdaynight 11d ago
        I don't agree with using your credentials to show your code quality, but I don't doubt you have better standards than most developers. That said, stop trying to change their minds. Antirez was a good at programming until he started coding using AI only. The same will be said about Carmack and Linus. What they are saying is increasingly difficult to defend, but they will do it anyways. I see the same arguments at my job, and I just gave up arguing against
        LatencyKills 11d ago
        [flagged]
    - basilikum 11d ago
      We can't judge code quality without having the code.
- deleted 11d ago
  [deleted]

jeltz 11d ago

LLMs produce pretty crappy code but they are very useful tools for protyping, code search and finding bugs. Maybe LLMs in the future will be able to write good code but they are very far from that right now.

basilikum 11d ago
Perhaps it would be useful if both of you could provide examples of supposedly good and bad code – the latter being the result of a genuine effort to produce good code with state of the art models. Just asserting that LLM code is good or bad ends in a yes - no - yes - no back and forth circle immediately.
- LatencyKills 11d ago
  I just used an LLM (along with my decades of operating system development experience) to create a macOS tool [0] that lets me see through windows, instead of having to continually command+tab between windows. The solution required reverse engineering and internals knowledge that most human engineers don't even have. The question is no longer "Can an LLM write code?". It can. The problem is that certain humans refuse to put in the effort required to properly utilize these tools. [0] https://imgur.com/a/2CUEjmA https://imgur.com/a/2CUEjmA
  - pessimizer 11d ago
    LLMs have been good at knowing what's in the manual from v1.0. Super good at that. Pretty good translators. Pretty good at doing things that have been done a million times before, like your CRUD app. Super mediocre at everything else. LLMs as things that know what's in the manual are AAA+. Extremely helpful. Very good at making a rough draft of something filled with a lot of stupid mistakes and no new abstractions. That's what your transparent window thing is. Something that you could never ship, is probably too big and doing senseless things for no intelligible reason, and definitely has bizarre bugs.
    - LatencyKills 11d ago
      What in the world are you talking about? I was literally an senior engineer on the Windows Kernel team, the Visual Studio team, and the Xcode team at Apple. This application, named Seymore, is being evaluated for purchase by several tech companies. (It helps having good industry contacts) There was a ton of interesting engineering required to make this work at 60 fps+ without resorting to hacks or using private APIs. Most macOS engineers wouldn't even know where to start. I've shipped code that is used by billions of people and all you just did was spew a bunch of bullshit. As someone who has built their own LLM from scratch, I have an extremely good idea of what they can and can't do. If you don't know how to use these tools, you'll end up with crap. If you DO know how to use them, they are incredibly useful.
      - tuesdaynight 11d ago
        I don't agree with using your credentials to show your code quality, but I don't doubt you have better standards than most developers. That said, stop trying to change their minds. Antirez was a good at programming until he started coding using AI only. The same will be said about Carmack and Linus. What they are saying is increasingly difficult to defend, but they will do it anyways. I see the same arguments at my job, and I just gave up arguing against
        LatencyKills 11d ago
        [flagged]
  - basilikum 11d ago
    We can't judge code quality without having the code.
deleted 11d ago
[deleted]