this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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Computer programming has radically changed. Huge help having llm auto complete and chat built in. IDEs like Cursor and Windsurf.
I’ve been a developer for 35 years. This is shaking it up as much as the internet did.
I quit my previous job in part because I couldn't deal with the influx of terrible, unreliable, dangerous, bloated, nonsensical, not even working code that was suddenly pushed into one of the projects I was working on. That project is now completely dead, they froze it on some arbitrary version.
When junior dev makes a mistake, you can explain it to them and they will not make it again. When they use llm to make a mistake, there is nothing to explain to anyone.
I compare this shake more to an earthquake than to anything positive you can associate with shaking.
And so, the problem wasn't the ai/llm, it was the person who said "looks good" without even looking at the generated code, and then the person who read that pull request and said, again without reading the code, "lgtm".
If you have good policies then it doesn't matter how many bad practice's are used, it still won't be merged.
The only overhead is that you have to read all the requests but if it's an internal project then telling everyone to read and understand their code shouldn't be the issue.
This is a problem with your team/project. It’s not a problem with the technology.
I hardly see it changed to be honest. I work in the field too and I can imagine LLMs being good at producing decent boilerplate straight out of documentation, but nothing more complex than that.
I often use LLMs to work on my personal projects and - for example - often Claude or ChatGPT 4o spit out programs that don't compile, use inexistent functions, are bloated etc. Possibly for languages with more training (like Python) they do better, but I can't see it as a "radical change" and more like a well configured snippet plugin and auto complete feature.
LLMs can't count, can't analyze novel problems (by definition) and provide innovative solutions...why would they radically change programming?
You’re missing it. Use Cursor or Windsurf. The autocomplete will help in so many tedious situations. It’s game changing.
ChatGPT 4o isn't even the most advanced model, yet I have seen it do things you say it can't. Maybe work on your prompting.
That is my experience, it's generally quite decent for small and simple stuff (as I said, distillation of documentation). I use it for rust, where I am sure the training material was much smaller than other languages. It's not a matter a prompting though, it's not my prompt that makes it hallucinate functions that don't exist in libraries or make it write code that doesn't compile, it's a feature of the technology itself.
GPTs are statistical text generators after all, they don't "understand" the problem.
Exactly this. Things have already changed and are changing as more and more people learn how and where to use these technologies. I have seen even teachers use this stuff who have limited grasp of technology in general.