Comment by tptacek
10 months ago
How is that better? As a team lead, what would you think of a team member who consistently generated "crap" pull requests?
You see the same thing in every argument with LLM skeptics. 'The code is bad. You don't even know what the code is doing." This is obviously false. A professional reads the code they commit and push. A professional doesn't push code they know to be bad.
"Let's identify specific, clear areas for improvement, and if they are not able to improve, let's fire them": it's as simple as that.
Teaching a human with motivation, potential and desire to learn is both easier, and more rewarding (for most humans), than attempting to teach LLM to write good code every time — humans tend to value their personal experiences more, whereas LLM relies more on the training corpus. So when I've seen people massage LLM output to be decent or excellent, it took them more time than it would have taken for them to write it from scratch without an LLM.
Which makes LLMs mostly a curiosity, and not a productivity booster. Can it get there? I hope it can, because that would be amazing.
None of this responds to what I just wrote. Can you engage with the question I asked directly? Thanks!
You asked:
This is directly answered with my first paragraph: that's exactly what I would think of them, and how I would act on it.
Your first question was:
In the second paragraph, I explained why it's better to do a code review for a crappy pull request that's human-produced vs LLM-generated: it is easier, faster, and more psychologically rewarding.
If you are talking about a case where an inexperienced human uses LLM to start off with a crappy code change, but then adapts the output during the review process, and potentially learns through it (though research confirms people learn better when they produce mistakes themselves) — they still won't be able to use LLM to produce comparable code the next time, so they'll have to do the review and improve it by hand before putting it up for review by somebody else, thus negating any productivity gain (which was the original premise), and likely reducing the learning potential.
If there was a question I misinterpreted, please enlighten me. Thanks! :)
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