Comment by joshka

1 year ago

> Of course, these LLMs won’t replace software engineers anytime soon, because it requires a strong engineering background to recognize what is actually a good idea, along with other constraints that are domain specific. Even with the amount of code available on the internet, LLMs can’t discern between average code and good, highly-performant code without guidance.

There are some objective measures which can be pulled out of the code and automated (complexity measures, use of particular techniques / libs, etc.) These can be automated, and then LLMs can be trained to be decent at recognizing more subjective problems (e.g. naming, obviousness, etc.). There are a lot of good engineering practices which come down to doing the same thing as the usual thing which is in that space rather than doing something new. An engine that is good at detecting novelties seems intuitively like it would be helpful in recognizing good ideas (even given the problems of hallucinations so far seen). Extending the idea of the article to this aspect, the problem seems like it's one of prompting / training rather than a terminal blocker.