Comment by douglasisshiny

2 months ago

I've had the same experience as the person to whom you're responding. After reading your post, I have to ask: if you're putting so much effort into prompting it with specific points, correcting it often, etc., why not just write the code yourself? It sounds like you're putting a good deal of effort into prompting it.

Aren't you worried that overtime you'll rely on it too much and your offhand knowledge will get worse?

5 comments

douglasisshiny

CrimsonRain 2 months ago

I'm still spending less effort/time. A very significant amount.

I do write plenty of things myself. Sometimes, I ignore AI completely and write 100s of lines. Sometimes, I take copilot suggestions every other line, as I'm writing something "common" and copilot can "read" my mind. And sometimes, I write 100s of lines purely by prompting. It is a fine line when to do which; also depends on mood.

I am not worried about that as I spend hours everyday reading. I'm also the type of person who, when something is needed in a document, do not search for it using CTRL+F, but manually look thru it. It always takes more time but I also learn adjacent things to the topic I need.

And I never commit a single line from AI without reading and understanding it myself. So it might come up with 100 line solution for me, but I probably already know what I wanted and off chance it came up with something correct but in a way I did not know, I do read and learn it.

Ultimately, to me, the knowledge that I can !reset null in docker compose override is important. Remembering if it is !null reset or reset !null or !reset null (i.e., syntax) is not important. My offhand knowledge is not getting worse as I am constantly learning things; I just focus less on specific syntaxes or API signatures now.

You can apply the same argument with IDE. Almost all developers will fail to write proper JS/TS/Java etc without IDE help.

CopyOnWrite 2 months ago

I have read somewhere, that LLMs are mostly helpful to junior developers.

Is it possible the person claiming success with all these languages/tools/technologies is just on a junior level and is subjectively correct but has no point of reference how fast coding is for seniors and how quality code looks like?

CrimsonRain 2 months ago

1. You have read somewhere...but you don't have any experience. LLMs are really bad for Junior developers.

  A. They have no skills/exp to judge AI output
  B. They don't learn from sudden magical wall of code output
  C. They don't get to explore; thus don't learn.
  D. Ultimately, LLMs act as a bad drug to them that keeps them dependent and stagnant.
  E. LLMs are really good for higher end of senior devs. This also means, they don't need as many Juniors anymore and they don't mentor juniors much. This is the biggest loss for Juniors.

2. I think you are absolutely right. I became a Staff Engineer with junior level LLM coding. More power to me I guess :(

xandrius 2 months ago

Not OP, it be comes natural and doesn't take a lot of time.

Anyway, if you want to, LLMs can today help with a ton of programming languages and frameworks. If you use any of the top 5 languages and it still doesn't work for you, either you're doing some esoteric work or you're doing it wrong.

CopyOnWrite 2 months ago

Could you point me to a youtube video or a blog post which demonstrates how LLMs help writing code which outperforms a proficient human?
My only conditions:
- It must be demonstrated by adding a feature on a bigger code base (>= 20 LOC)
- The added feature cannot be a leaf feature (means it must integrate with the rest of the system at multiple points)
- The prompting has to be less effort/faster than to type the solution in the programming language
You can chose any programming language/framework that you want. I don't care if it is Java, JavaScript, Typescript, C, Python, ... hell, I am fine with any language with or w/o a framework.