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Comment on Why LLMs can't really build software

hisao@ani.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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Feyd@programming.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Wow you just completely destroyed any credibility about your software development opinions.

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- hisao@ani.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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  - Feyd@programming.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    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 part.
    
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    hisao@ani.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The fact that I dislike it that it turned out that software engineering is not a good place for self-expression or for demonstrating your power level or the beauty and depth of your intricate thought patterns through advanced constructs and structures you come up with, doesn’t mean that I disagree that this is true.
    
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very_well_lost@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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  - TechLich@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I feel like this isn’t quite true and is something I hear a lot of people say about ai. That it’s good at following requirements and confirming and being a mechanical and logical robot because that’s what computers are like and that’s how it is in sci fi.
    
    In reality, it seems like that’s what they’re worst at. They’re great at seeing patterns and creating ideas but terrible at following instructions or staying on task. As soon as something is a bit bigger than they can track context for, they’ll get “creative” and if they see a pattern that they can complete, they will, even if it’s not correct. I’ve had copilot start writing poetry in my code because there was a string it could complete.
    
    Get it to make a pretty looking static web page with fancy css where it gets to make all the decisions? It does it fast.
    
    Give it an actual, specific programming task in a full sized application with multiple interconnected pieces and strict requirements? It confidently breaks most of the requirements, and spits out garbage. If it can’t hold the entire thing in its context, or if there’s a lot of strict rules to follow, it’ll struggle and forget what it’s doing or why. Like a particularly bad human programmer would.
    
    This is why AI is automating art and music and writing and not more mundane/logical/engineering tasks. Great at being creative and balls at following instructions for more than a few steps.
    
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    hisao@ani.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    That it’s good at following requirements and confirming and being a mechanical and logical robot because that’s what computers are like and that’s how it is in sci fi.
    
    They’re good at that because they are ANNs.
    
    In reality, it seems like that’s what they’re worst at. They’re great at seeing patterns and creating ideas but terrible at following instructions or staying on task. As soon as something is a bit bigger than they can track context for, they’ll get “creative” and if they see a pattern that they can complete, they will, even if it’s not correct. I’ve had copilot start writing poetry in my code because there was a string it could complete.
    
    Get it to make a pretty looking static web page with fancy css where it gets to make all the decisions? It does it fast.
    
    Give it an actual, specific programming task in a full sized application with multiple interconnected pieces and strict requirements? It confidently breaks most of the requirements, and spits out garbage. If it can’t hold the entire thing in its context, or if there’s a lot of strict rules to follow, it’ll struggle and forget what it’s doing or why. Like a particularly bad human programmer would.
    
    This is why AI is automating art and music and writing and not more mundane/logical/engineering tasks. Great at being creative and balls at following instructions for more than a few steps.
    
    My experience is opposite.
    
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