• 4 Posts
  • 362 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: September 11th, 2023

help-circle








  • I’ve long maintained that actually writing code is only a small part of the job. Understanding the code that exists and knowing what code to write is 90% of it.

    I don’t personally feel that gen AI has a place in my work, because I think about the code as I’m writing it. By the time I have a complete enough understanding of what I want the code to do in order to write it into a prompt, the work is already mostly done, and banging out the code that remains and seeing it come to life is just pure catharsis.

    The idea of having to hand-hold an LLM through figuring out the solution itself just doesn’t sound fun to me. If I had to do that, I’d rather be teaching an actual human to do it.



  • But at a certain point, it seems like you spend more time babysitting and spoon-feeding the LLM than you do writing productive code.

    There’s a lot of busywork that I could see it being good for, like if you’re asked to generate 100 test cases for an API with a bunch of tiny variations, but that kind of work is inherently low value. And in most cases you’re probably better off using a tool designed for the job, like a fuzzer.


  • Technus@lemmy.ziptoProgramming@programming.devLLMS Are Not Fun
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    126
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    19 days ago

    I’ve maintained for a while that LLMs don’t make you a more productive programmer, they just let you write bad code faster.

    90% of the job isn’t writing code anyway. Once I know what code I wanna write, banging it out is just pure catharsis.

    Glad to see there’s other programmers out there who actually take pride in their work.




  • I was thinking about this the other day and realized something:

    Back when the modern Santa character was first being developed, coal was a genuinely useful thing. It was fuel for the stove which heated your house and cooked your food. It was a basic necessity of life.

    If you were naughty, Santa didn’t just give you nothing. You weren’t going to get an awesome toy, but he made sure you weren’t going to freeze to death on Christmas, either.

    Santa believes everyone deserves to live. That having a warm place to sleep is a basic human right.

    This might be /r/im14andthisisdeep material, but I just thought that was interesting.






  • What happens to the guy that was driving it? Does he just blink out of existence when the car shuts off? That’s my question. You might argue that there is no such thing, but my own conscious experience proves to myself that there’s something else there. I want to know what happens to that part.

    Hell, for all I know, you might just be a soulless meatbag automaton, and there really is no one in the driver’s seat for you. Or I could just be the only actual human talking in a thread full of bots. With 90% of the training data going into LLMs being vapid contrarian debates on social media, I could easily see that being the case here.