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I have programmed 30K+ hours. Do LLMs make bad code: yes all the time (at the moment zero clue about good architecture). Are they still useful: yes, extremely s
by dhpe 9mo ago
I have programmed 30K+ hours. Do LLMs make bad code: yes all the time (at the moment zero clue about good architecture). Are they still useful: yes, extremely so. The secret sauce is that you'd know exactly what to do without them.
- feverzsj 9mo agoSo, it's like taking off your pants to fart.
- qsort 9mo agoOne of the mental frameworks that convinced me is how much of a "free action" it is. Have the LLM (or the agent) churn on some problem and do something else. Come back and review the result. If you had to put significant effort into each query, I agree it wouldn't be worth it, but you can just type something into the textbox and wait.
- daveguy 9mo agoAre you counting the time/effort to evaluate the accuracy and relevance of an LLM left to "think" for a while?
- _rpxpx 9mo agoOK, maybe. But how many programmers will know this in 10 years' time as use of LLMs is normalized? I like to hear what employers are saying already about recent graduates.
- bartread 9mo agoThey’d have to be hiring recent graduates for you to hear that perspective. And, as much as what I’ve just said is hyperbolically pessimistic, there is some truth to it. In the UK a bunch of factors have coincided to put the brakes on hiring, especially smaller and mid-size businesses. AI is the obvious one that gets all the press (although how much it’s really to blame is open to question in my view), but the recent rise in employer AI contribution, and now (anecdotally) the employee rights bill have come together to make companies quite gunshy when it comes to hiring.
- bartread 9mo ago*Employer NI contribution, not employer AI contribution - a pox be upon autocorrect
- spaceman_2020 9mo agoThis is nothing new - entire industries and skills died out as the apprenticeship system and guilds were replaced by automation and factories
- energy123 9mo agoI'm uncertain that programming will be a major profession in 10 years. Programming is more like math than creative writing. It's largely verifiable, which is where RL is repeatedly proven to eventually achieve significantly better than human intelligence. Our saving grace, for now, is that it's not entirely verifiable because things like architectural taste are hard to put into a test. But I would not bet against it.
- nutjob2 9mo agoIf they don't learn that they won't get very far. This is true for everything, any tool you might use. Competent users of tools understand how they work and thus their limitations and how they're best put to work. Incompetents just fumble around and sometimes get things working.
- QuiDortDine 9mo agohahah what are you talking about, there's no such thing as long term!
- dejv 9mo ago"Do LLMs make bad code: yes all the time (at the moment zero clue about good architecture). Are they still useful: yes, extremely so." Well, lets see how all the economics will play out. LLMs might be really useful, but as far as I can see all the AI companies are not making money on inference alone. We might be hitting plateau in capabilities with money being raised on vision of being this godlike tech that will change the world completely. Sooner or later the costs will have to meet the reality.
- ImprobableTruth 9mo agoThey're not making money on inference alone because they blow ungodly amounts on R&D. Otherwise it'd be a very profitable business.
- daveguy 9mo agoPrivate equity will swoop in, bankrupt the company to shirk the debt of training / R&D, and hold on to the models in a restructuring. +Enshittification to squeeze maximum profit. This is why they're referred to as vulture capitalists.
- Workaccount2 9mo agoIf the tech plateaus today, LLM plans will go to $60-80/mo, Chinese-hosted chinese models will be banned (national security will be the given reason), and the AI companies will be making ungodly money. I'm not gonna dig out the math again, but if AI usage follows the popularity path of cell phone usage (which seems to be the case), then trillions invested has a ROI of 5-7 years. Not bad at all.
- iLoveOncall 9mo agoOpenAI would still lose money if the basic subscriptions were costing $500 and they had the same amount of subscribers as right now. There's not a single model shop who's ever making any money, let alone ungodly amounts.
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- bilsbie 9mo agoI mean if you leaned heavily on stack overflow before AI then nothing really changes. It’s basically the same idea but faster.
- ManuelKiessling 9mo agoIf I ask a SOTA model to just implement some functionality, it doesn’t necessarily do so using a great architectural approach. Whenever I ask a SOTA model about architecture recommendations, and frame the problem correctly, I get top notch answers every single time. LLMs are terrific software architects. And that’s not surprising, there has to be tons of great advice on how to correctly build software in the training corpus. They simply aren’t great software architects by default.
- Loic 9mo agoYou know that if you ask the LLM correctly you get top notch answers, because you have the experience to judge if the answer is top notch or not. I spend a couple of hours per week teaching software architecture to a junior in my team, because he has not the experience to not only ask correctly but also assess the quality of the answer from the LLM.
- yeasku 9mo agoI have programed 10 times that. For me LLMs are a waste of time.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 9mo ago300k hours = 8 hrs per day, every day, for 102 years.
- yeasku 9mo agoBehind the computer 16 hours a day all their life? I know a lot of people who does it.