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slibhb | on: Google CEO says more than a quarter of the company's new code is created by AI
Most programming is trivial. Lots of non-trivial programming tasks can be broken down into pure, trivial sections. Then, the non-trivial part becomes knowing how the entire system fits together.

I've been using LLMs for about a month now. It's a nice productivity gain. You do have to read generated code and understand it. Another useful strategy is pasting a buggy function and ask for revisions.

I think most programmers who claim that LLMs aren't useful are reacting emotionally. They don't want LLMs to be useful because, in their eyes, that would lower the status of programming. This is a silly insecurity: ultimately programmers are useful because they can think formally better than most people. For the forseeable future, there's going to be massive demand for that, and people who can do it will be high status.

tonyedgecombe | parent | next
>I think most programmers who claim that LLMs aren't useful are reacting emotionally.

I don't think that's true. Most programmers I speak to have been keen to try it out and reap some benefits.

The almost universal experience has been that it works for trivial problems, starts injecting mistakes for harder problems and goes completely off the rails for anything really difficult.

theshackleford | root | parent
> I don't think that's true. Most programmers I speak to have been keen to try it out and reap some benefits.

I’ve been seeing the complete opposite. So it’s out there.

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boringg | parent | next
Trivial is fine but as you compound all the triviality the system starts to have a difficult time with putting it together. I don't expect it to nail it but then you have to unwind everything and figure out the issues so it isn't all gravy - fair bit of debug.
shinycode | parent | next
It’s always harder to build a mental model of the code written by someone else. No matter what, if you trust an LLM on small things in the long run you’ll trust it for bigger things. And the most code the LLM writes, the harder it is to build this mental construct. In the end it’ll be « it worked on 90% of cases so we trust it ». And who will debug 300 millions of code written by a machine that no one read based on trust ?
jolt42 | parent | next
They are useful, but so far, I haven't seen LLMs being obviously more useful than stackoverflow. It might generate code closer to what I need than what I find already coded, but it also produces buggier code. Sometimes it will show me a function I wasn't aware of or approach I wouldn't have considered, but I have to balance that with all the other attempts that didn't produce something useful.
jerb | parent | next
Yes. Productivity tools make programmer time more valuable, not less. This is basic economics. You’re now able to generate more value per hour than before.

(Or if you’re being paid to waste time, maybe consider coding in assembly?)

So don’t be afraid. Learn to use the tools. They’re not magic, so stop expecting that. It’s like anything else, good at some things and not others.

Reason077 | parent | next
A good farmer isn’t likely to complain about getting a new tractor. But it might put a few horses out of work.
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coliveira | parent
> people who can do it will be high status

They don't have high status even today, imagine in a world where they will be seen as just reviewers for AI code...

uh_uh | root | parent
> They don't have high status even today

Try putting on a dating website that you work at Google vs you work in agriculture and tell us which yielded more dates.

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