Comment on Why LLMs can't really build software

• HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I saw an LLM override the casting operator in C#. An evangelist would say "genius! what a novel solution!" I said "nobody at this company is going to know what this code is doing 6 months from now."

  It didn't even solve our problem.

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  • hisao@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I saw an LLM override the casting operator in C#. An evangelist would say “genius! what a novel solution!” I said “nobody at this company is going to know what this code is doing 6 months from now.”

    Before LLMs people were often saying this about people smarter than the rest of the group. “Yeah he was too smart and overengineered solutions that no one could understand after he left,”. This is btw one of the reasons why I increasingly dislike programming as a field over the years and happily delegate the coding part to AI nowadays. This field celebrates conformism and that’s why humans shouldn’t write code manually. Perfect field to automate away via LLMs.

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    • very_well_lost@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Before LLMs people were often saying this about people smarter than the rest of the group.

      Smarter by whose metric? If you can’t write software that meets the bare minimum of comprehensibility, you’re probably not as smart as you think you are.

      Software engineering is an engineering discipline, and conformity is exactly what you want in engineering — because in engineering you don’t call it ‘conformity’, you call it ‘standardization’. Nobody wants to hire a maverick bridge-builder, they wanna hire the guy who follows standards and best practices because that’s how you build a bridge that doesn’t fall down. The engineers who don’t follow standards and who deride others as being too stupid or too conservative to understand their vision are the ones who end up crushed to death by their imploding carbon fiber submarine at the bottom of the Atlantic.

      AI has exactly the same “maverick” tendencies as human developers (because, surprise surprise, it’s trained on human output), and until that gets ironed out, it’s not suitable for writing anything more than the most basic boilerplate — which is stuff you can usually just copy-paste together in five minutes anyway.

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      • hisao@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        You’re right of course and engineering as a whole is a first-line subject to AI. Everything that has strict specs, standards, invariants will benefit massively from it, and conforming is what AI inherently excels at, as opposed to humans. Those complaints like the one this subthread started with are usually people being bad at writing requirements rather than AI being bad at following them. If you approach requirements like in actual engineering fields, you will get corresponding results, while humans will struggle to fully conform or even try to find tricks and loopholes in your requirements to sidestep them and assert their will while technically still remaining in “barely legal” territory.

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    • Feyd@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Wow you just completely destroyed any credibility about your software development opinions.

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      • hisao@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Why though? I think hating and maybe even disrespecting programming and wanting your job to be as much redundant and replaced as possible is actually the best mindset for a programmer. Maybe in the past it was a nice mindset to become a teamlead or a project manager, but nowadays with AI it’s a mindset for programmers.

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