Comment by ebiester
12 hours ago
I get that it's frustrating to be told "skill issue," but using an LLM is absolutely a skill and there's a combination of understanding the strengths of various tools, experimenting with them to understand the techniques, and just pure practice.
I think if I were giving access to bash, though, it would definitely be in a docker container for me as well.
Sure, you can probably get better at it, but is it really worth the effort over just getting better at programming?
If you are going to race a fighter jet, and you are on a bicycle, exercising more and eating right will not help. You have to use a better tool.
A good programmer with AI tools will run circles around a good programmer without AI tools.
To be fair, that's also what a lot of us used to say about IDEs. In reality, plenty of folks just turned vim into a fighter jet and did just as well without super-heavyweight llms.
I'm not totally convinced that we won't see a similar effect here, with some really competitive coders 100% eschewing LLMs and still doing as well as the best that use them.
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Got any evidence on that or is it just “vibes”? I have my doubts that AI tools are helping good programmers much at all, forget about “running circles” around others.
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What does that even mean? How do you even quantify that?
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Citation needed for your second sentence. This is the problem with AI hype cycles. Lots of outstanding claims, a lot less actual evidence supporting those claims. Lot of anecdotes though. Maybe the LLMs are in a loop recursively promoting themselves for that sweet venture funding.
You can do both
Except the skill involved is believing in random people's advice that a different model will surely be better with no fundamental reason or justification as to why. The benchmarks are not applicable when trying to apply the models to new work and benchmarks by there nature do not describe suitability to any particular problem.