I’ve seen a few articles saying that instead of hating AI, the real quiet programmers young and old are loving it and have a renewed sense of purpose coding with llm helpers (this article was also hating on ed zitiron, which makes sense why it would).

Is this total bullshit? I have to admit, even though it makes me ill, I’ve used llms a few times to help me learn simple code syntax quickly (im and absolute noob who’s wanted my whole life to learn code but cant grasp it very well). But yes, a lot of time its wrong.

  • Quibblekrust@thelemmy.clubEnglish
    59·
    11 months ago

    I don’t see how it could be more effecient to have [a junior developer write] something that you then have to review and make sure actually works over just writing the code yourself…

    • iglou@programming.dev
      8·
      11 months ago
      1. A junior dev wont be a junior dev their whole career, code reviews also educates them
      2. You can’t trust the quality of a junior’s work, but you can trust that they are able to understand the project and their role in it. LLMs are by definition unable to think and understand. Just pretty good at pretending they are. Which leads to the third point:
      3. When you “vibe code”, you don’t “just” have to review the produced code, you also have to constantly tell the LLM what you want it to do. And fight with it when it fucks up.
        • leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          61·
          11 months ago

          They’ll never be able to learn, though.

          A LLM is merely a statistical model of its training material. Very well indexed but extremely lossy compression.

          It will always be outdated. It can never become familiar with your codebase and coding practices. And it’ll always be extremely unreliable, because it’s just a text generator without any semblance of comprehension about what the texts it generates actually mean.

          All it’ll ever be able to do is reproduce the standards as they were when its training model was captured.

          If we are to compare it to a junior developer, it’d be someone who suffered a traumatic brain injury just after leaving college, which prevents them from ever learning anything new, makes them unaware that they can’t learn, and incapable of realising when they don’t know something, makes them unable to reason or comprehend what they are saying, and causes them to suffer from verbal diarrhoea and excessive sycophancy.

          Now, such a tragically brain damaged individual might look like the ideal worker to the average CEO, but I definitely wouldn’t want them anywhere near my code.