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Comment by TheOccasionalWr

4 months ago

I'm not sure what you mean with the "code snippets are straight out of Stackoverflow". That is factually incorrect just by how LLM works. By now there has been so much code ingested from all kinds of sources, including Stackoverflow LLM is able to help generate quite good code in many occasions. My point being it is extremly useful for super popular languages and many languages where resources are more scarce for developer but because they got the code from who knows where, it can definitely give you many useful ideas.

It's not human, which I'm not sure what is supposed to actually mean. Humans make mistakes, humans make good code. AI does also both. What it definitely needs is a good programmer still on top to know what he is getting and how to improve it.

I find AI (LLM) very useful as a very good code completion and light coder where you know exactly what to do because you did it a thousand times but it's wasteful to be typing it again. Especially a lot of boilerplate code or tests.

It's also useful for agentic use cases because some things you just couldn't do before because there was nothing to understand a human voice/text input and translate that to an actual command.

But that is all far from some AGI and it all costs a lot today an average company to say that this actually provided return on the money but it definitely speeds things up.

> I'm not sure what you mean with the "code snippets are straight out of Stackoverflow". That is factually incorrect just by how LLM works.

I'm not an AI lover, but I did try Gemini for a small, well-contained algorithm for a personal project that I didn't want to spend the time looking up, and it was straight-up a StackOverflow solution. I found out because I said "hm, there has to be a more elegant solution", and quickly found the StackOverflow solution that the AI regurgitated. Another 10 or 20 minutes of hunting uncovered another StackOverflow solution with the requisite elegance.