You can hardly get online these days without hearing some AI booster talk about how AI coding is going to replace human programmers. AI code is absolutely up to production quality! Also, you’re all…
I dunno. I feel like the programmers who came before me could say the same thing about IDEs, Stack Overflow, and high level programming languages. Assembly looks like gobbledygook to me and they tell me I’m a Senior Dev.
If someone uses ChatGPT like I use StackOverflow, I’m not worried. We’ve been stealing code from each other since the beginning.“Getting the answer” and then having to figure out how to plug it into the rest of the code is pretty much what we do.
There isn’t really a direct path from an LLM to a good programmer. You can get good snippets, but “ChatGPT, build me a app” will be largely useless. The programmers who come after me will have to understand how their code works just as much as I do.
I mean past a certain point LLMs are strictly worse tools than Stack Overflow was on its worst day. IDEs have a bunch of features to help manage complexity and offload memorization. The fundamental task of understanding the code you’re writing is still yours. Stack Overflow and other forums are basically crowdsourced mentorship programs. Someone out there knows the thing you need to and rather than cultivate a wide social network you can take advantage of mass communication. To use it well you still need to know what’s happening, and if you don’t you can at least trust that the information is out there somewhere that you might be able to follow up on as needed. LLM assistants are designed to create output that looks plausible and to tell the user what they want to hear. If the user is an idiot the LLM will do nothing to make them recognize that they’re doing something wrong, much less help them fix it.
I dunno. I feel like the programmers who came before me could say the same thing about IDEs, Stack Overflow, and high level programming languages. Assembly looks like gobbledygook to me and they tell me I’m a Senior Dev.
If someone uses ChatGPT like I use StackOverflow, I’m not worried. We’ve been stealing code from each other since the beginning.“Getting the answer” and then having to figure out how to plug it into the rest of the code is pretty much what we do.
There isn’t really a direct path from an LLM to a good programmer. You can get good snippets, but “ChatGPT, build me a app” will be largely useless. The programmers who come after me will have to understand how their code works just as much as I do.
fuck almighty I wish you and your friends would just do better
LLM as another tool is great. LLM to replace experienced coders is a nightmare waiting to happen.
IDEs, stack overflow, they are tools that makes the life of a developers a lot easier, they don’t replace him.
I mean past a certain point LLMs are strictly worse tools than Stack Overflow was on its worst day. IDEs have a bunch of features to help manage complexity and offload memorization. The fundamental task of understanding the code you’re writing is still yours. Stack Overflow and other forums are basically crowdsourced mentorship programs. Someone out there knows the thing you need to and rather than cultivate a wide social network you can take advantage of mass communication. To use it well you still need to know what’s happening, and if you don’t you can at least trust that the information is out there somewhere that you might be able to follow up on as needed. LLM assistants are designed to create output that looks plausible and to tell the user what they want to hear. If the user is an idiot the LLM will do nothing to make them recognize that they’re doing something wrong, much less help them fix it.