Hacker News Reader

Comment by hirako2000 | Hacker News Reader

hirako2000

More time for the things I do?

All AI tools I've used turned my daily into fighting the agent.

While LLMs can save time on tedious repetitive tasks, they are atrocities in producing bug free code. Even if they reached 99.999% accuracy without, they wouldn't be worth it: If I wrote a function and it turns out buggy, I can, even months later, investigate and find the culprit.

If an LLM introduces a bug, I would rather scrap everything. That is, every piece of code the thing produced for a given project.

If my boss tells me my job is to provide a patch, I quit.

And, LLMs have proven so far that they can't produce innovative solutions.

View on HN

If LLMs could produce innovative solutions, they wouldn't be large language models. They'd be valuable and indispensable software engineers to covet instead.

Don't you agree that having a free artificial junior developer at your beck and call is better than not having freely and quickly produced code that can help point you into the direction your engineering needs to go in?

As a senior developer, don't you also fight with managing your subordinates? Don't you have to solve the management problem and do leadership tasks?

As a senior developer, don't you also have to deal with code that is not bug free, as you yourself don't always produce bug free code? Especially on the first try.

Maybe your approach to LLMs is wrong? Maybe you expect one shot solutions when that is not how LLMs are supposed to be used? Instead, you could invest in working with this new tool and then see phenomenal productivity gains. And also maybe grow a new capability in software development with the use of LLMs in your engineering.

I wouldn't agree to call any of that a developer, adding junior to the term doesn't move the needle.

I wouldn't call a calculator a mini accountant. These things can operate much faster than an army of mathematicians but they remain tools. Of course l, tools humans can leverage. Productivity gains are phenomenal.

Perhaps my input to the topic wasn't clear. I use LLMs. I use LLMs in the context of software engineering. I don't treat them as my peers. I don't dream of a future where this tech can solve more than its often misunderstood scope.

We are letting ourselves be confused by those who do have an interest in, or can't do better than, up selling.

Engineers are already having to deal with very difficult to reconcile side effects. Maybe you aren't seeing it yet, or your comment would have at least recognized and touched on those.

A bad developer is still a developer. Even if that developer is largely wrong, the majority of the employed developer's operating time consisting of unproductive efforts that will always need to be remedied by expert problem solving and engineering. But the LLM is such a naughty developer that is free (insofar as the pennies worth of electricity and microprocessor metals for running a local LLM is virtually no cost). Not only is it free, it is also able to give you a huge volume of labor. So, an LLM can give you a volume of free labor. And within the probability distribution of that large volume of free labor, there is the chance that bad developer will give you something valuable that can be productive and make up for all the losses you endured dealing with the eager assistant LLM developer. The bottom line is that being a skilled developer will require the employment of artificial intelligence's presently unwieldy enthusiasm and capability. As a sort of necessary evil that has on the opposite side of the bad side, the good side, unexpected insights, massive productivity, and unprecedented development. LLMs are probably the only way to perform the work of a hundred men all by yourself.

Unless what you're doing doesn't demand risk taking, perseverance, and a visionary's personality? In which case, we should call a spade a spade and, therefore, recognize that most (if not all) so called senior software developers are nothing more than state welfare recipients who are fungible to companies and economics that can get rid of the drag on their progress if they really wanted to. If you're not learning how to struggle with LLMs, you're probably not improving and growing as a software engineer. You'll then be limited to tentatively useful areas of the Internet. Like working for a FAANG, Tesla, or SpaceX or some other mundane shit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com