Comment by unlikelytomato
2 months ago
This is why I'm confused when people say it isn't ready to replace most of the programmer workforce.
2 months ago
This is why I'm confused when people say it isn't ready to replace most of the programmer workforce.
I love that you’re getting straightforward replies to this absolutely sick burn. The blade is so sharp that some people aren’t even feeling it.
LLM code is higher quality than any codes I have seen in my 20 years in F500. So yeah you need to "guide" it, and ensure that it will not bypass all the security guidance for ex...But at least you are in control, although the cognitive load is much higher as well than just "blind trust of what is delivered".
But I can see the carnage with offshoring+LLM, or "most employees", including so call software engineer + LLM.
Huh, that explains a lot about the F500, and their buzzword slogans like "culture of excellence".
LLM code is still mostly absurdly bad, unless you tell it in painstaking detail what to do and what to avoid, and never ask it to do a bigger job at a time than a single function or very small class.
Edit: I'll admit though that the detailed explanation is often still much less work than typing everything yourself. But it is a showstopper for autonomous "agentic coding".
> unless you tell it in painstaking detail what to do and what to avoid, and never ask it to do a bigger job at a time than a single function or very small class.
This is hyperbolic, but the general sentiment is accurate enough, at least for now. I've noticed a bimodal distribution of quality when using these tools. The people who approach the LLM from the lens of a combo architect & PM, do all the leg work, set up the guard rails, define the acceptance criteria, these are the people who get great results. The people who walk up and say "sudo make me a sandwich" do not.
Also the latter group complains that they don't see the point of the first group. Why would they put in all the work when they could just code? But what they don't see is that *someone* was always doing that work, it just wasn't them in the past. We're moving to a world where the mechanical part of grinding the code is not worth much, people who defined their existence as avoiding all the legwork will be left in the cold.
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If you're using words in English to "tell it in painstaking detail", you're doing it the hard way.
You can provide it with a tool to do that. Agents run tools in a loop, give it good tools. We have linters, code analysers, fuzzers and everything else.
Configure them correctly, tell the agent to use them (in painstaking detail) and it can't mess things up.
Uhuh. Let me present you Rudolph. For the next 15 minutes, he will paste pieces of top rated SO answers and top starred GH repos. Then he will suffer complete amnesia. He might not understand your question or remember what he just did, but the code he pastes is higher quality than any codes you have seen in your 20 years in F500! For 20$ a month, he's all yours, he just needs a 4 hour break every 5 hours. But he runs on money, like gumball machine, so you can wake him with a donation. Oh, you are responsible for giving him precise instructions, that he often ignores in favour of other instructions from uncle Sam. No, you can't see them.
"Any codes"?
At least my comment hasn't been reviewed or written by a LLM.
And in my French brain, code or codebase is countable and not uncountable.
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You'll find, at times, that those communicating in a language that's not their primary language will tend to deviate from what one whose it was their primary language might expect.
If that's obvious to you than you're just being rude. If it's not obvious to you, then you'll also find this is a common deviance (plural 'code') from those who come from a particular primary language's region.
Edit; This got me thinking - what is the grammar/rule around what gets pluralized and what doesn't? How does one know that "code" can refer to a single line of code, a whole file of code, a project, or even the entirety of all code your eyes have ever seen without having to have an s tacked on to the end of it?
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FWIW, I've noticed that scientists (native English speakers at least) will say "codes" rather "code". I don't know if this is universal or just specific domains (physics) nor if this is common or rare, but I've noticed it.
Offshoring pretty much guarantees a couple vibe coders will be there to operate
Giving it prompts of the Shannon project helps for security
You've worked at some shitty places. Nothing I've seen from Claude matches even my worst coworker (and my last job was an F500)
If you a) know what you are doing and b) know what an llm is capable of doing, c) can manage multiple llm agents at a time, you can be unbelievably productive. Those skills I think are less common than people assume.
You need to be technical, have good communication skills, have big picture vision, be organized, etc. If you are a staff level engineer, you basically feel like you don’t need anyone else.
OTOH i have been seeing even fairly technical engineering managers struggle because they can’t get the LLMs to execute because they don’t know how to ask it what to do.
> can manage multiple llm agents at a time
How is that supposed to work? Humans are notoriously poor at multi-tasking. If you spend all day context switching between agents you’re going to have a bad time.
I deployed a whole fleet of agents working Jira tickets and PRs a couple of weeks ago. You manage them the way you manage people.
it's like that '11 rules for showrunning' doc where you need to operate at a level where you understand the product being made, and the people making it, and their capabilities, in order to make things come out well without touching them directly.
(https://okbjgm.weebly.com/uploads/3/1/5/0/31506003/11_laws_o...)
if you can do every job + parallelize + read fast, and you are only limited by the time it takes to type, claude is remarkable. I'm not superhuman in those ways but in the small domains where I am it has helped a lot; in other domains it has ramped me to 'working prototype' 10x faster than I could have alone, but the quality of output seems questionable and I'm not smart enough to improve it
Yeah that describes most legacy codebases I've worked on XD
For me, I'll do the engineering work of designing a system, then give it the specific designs and constraints. I'll let it plan out the implementation, then I give it notes if it varies in ways I didn't expect. Once we agree on a solution, that's when I set it free. The frontier models usually do a pretty good job with this work flow at this point.
That’s vibe coding and you won’t read more than 20% of the code written that way. You really can’t build complex software that way
At least he gets to enjoy doing the remaining 80% of the work in a lovely codebase with foundations written by an LLM.
Really? Because this perfectly explains why it will never replace them: it needs an exact language listing everything required to function as you expect it.
You need code to get it to generate proper code.
I think GP was a joke about the ability of a typical programmer.
I certainly read it as one and found it funny.
Heh, people like to have someone else to blame.
This comment is why I read HN