Comment on Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions

• MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  If you’re writing cutting edge shit, then LLM is probably at best a rubber duck for talking things through. Then there are tons of programmers where the job is to translate business requirements into bog standard code over and over and over.

  Nothing about my job is novel except the contortions demanded by the customer — and whatever the current trendy JS framework is to try to beat it into a real language. But I am reasonably good at what I do, having done it for thirty years.

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  • Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Yeah the internet seems to think coding is an expert thing when 99.9% of coders do exactly what you described. I do it, you do it, everybody does it. Even the people claiming to do big boy coding, when you really look at the details, they’re mostly slapping bog standard code on business needs.

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  • chaosCruiser@futurology.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Boring standard coding is exactly where you can actually let the LLM write the code. Manual intervention and review is still required, but at least you can speed up the process.

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    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Code made up of severally parts with inconsistently styles of coding and design is going to FUCK YOU UP in the middle and long terms unless you never again have to touch that code.

      It’s only faster if you’re doing small enough projects that an LLM can generate the whole thing in one go (so, almost certainly, not working as professional at a level beyond junior) and it’s something you will never have to maintain (i.e. prototyping).

      Using an LLM is like giving the work to a large group of junior developers were each time you give them work it’s a random one that picks up the task and you can’t actually teach them: even when it works, what you get is riddled with bad practices and design errors that are not even consistently the same between tasks so when you piece the software together it’s from the very start the kind of spaghetti mess you see in a project with lots of years in production which has been maintained by lots of different people who didn’t even try to follow each others coding style.

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      • MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        That is a bit … overblown. If you establish an interface, to a degree you can just ignore how the AI does the implementation because it’s all private, replaceable code. You’re right that LLMs do best with limited scope, but you can constrain scope by only asking for implementation of a SOLID design. You can be picky about the details, but you can also say “look at this class and use a similar coding paradigm.”

        It doesn’t have to be pure chaos, but you’re right that it does way better with one-off scripts than it does with enterprise-level code. Vibe coding is going to lead people to failure, but if you know what you’re doing, you can guide it to produce good code. It’s a tool. It increases efficiency a bit. But it also don’t replace developers or development skills.

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• SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Yeah but in that edge case SO wouldn’t help either even before the current crash. Unless you were lucky. I find LLM useful to push me in the right direction when I’m stuck and documentation isn’t helping either not necessarily to give me perfectly written code. It’s like pair programming with someone who isn’t a coder but somehow has read all the documentation and programming books. Sometimes the left field suggestions it makes are quite helpful.

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  • chaosCruiser@futurology.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I’ve found some interesting and even good new functions by moaning my code woes to an LLM. Also, it has taken me on some pointless wild goose chases too, so you better watch out. Any suggestion has the potential to be anywhere from absolutely brilliant to a completely stupid waste of time.

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