Comment by tottenhm

It learnt from the best

It's ego won't get in the way but it's lack of intelligence will.

Whereas a junior might be reluctant at first, but if they are smart they will learn and get better.

So maybe LLM are better than not-so-smart people, but you usually try to avoid hiring those people in the first place.

Key differences, though:

Humans are reliably unreliable. Some are lazy, some sloppy, some obtuse, some all at once. As a tech lead you can learn their strengths and weaknesses. LLMs vacillate wildly while maintaining sycophancy and arrogance.

Human egos make them unlikely to admit error, sometimes, but that fragile ego also gives them shame and a vision of glory. An egotistical programmer won’t deliver flat garbage for fear of being exposed as inferior, and can be cajoled towards reasonable output with reward structures and clear political rails. LLMs fail hilariously and shamelessly in indiscriminate fashion. They don’t care, and will happily argue both sides of anything.

Also that thing that LLMs don’t actually learn. You can threaten to chop their fingers off if they do something again… they don’t have fingers, they don’t recall, and can’t actually tell if they did the thing. “I’m not lying, oops I am, no I’m not, oops I am… lemme delete the home directory and see if that helps…”

If we’re going to make an analogy to a human, LLMs reliably act like absolute psychopaths with constant disassociation. They lie, lie about lying, and lie about following instructions.

I agree LLMs better than your average junior first time following first directives. I’m far less convinced about that story over time, as the dialog develops more effective juniors over time.