Comment by msdz
19 hours ago
> hairy realtime concurrent system programming
On the other hand, I’ve heard a direct quote from the longtime (25+ YoE) colleague of someone I know, that in their mostly embedded/some realtime work, the LLM code quality (specifically, this was about Opus 5.5 IIRC) has now surpassed his own. And that person is an excellent programmer, and the model is faster and cheaper!
So it’s definitely not just standard CRUD that is on the way to – or already – “solved”. As with all things, the truth is probably somewhere in between.
In my experience, it's more about "local" vs "large-scale" thinking. An LLM will be better at finding a bug that's "visible on screen" (or on the context window), whereas some design decisions that are hard to even put in words can be super important in practice (like, in C, how you manage the lifetimes of various objects, how you organise your threads and locks...) That's not purely "word manipulation", and there are not many good explanations of that on the internet, so it's understandably harder to learn for an LLM. A bit like chess vs go. They will get there quickly I'm sure. After all, AI beats us at go, too.