• brie@programming.dev
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    1 day ago

    Large context window LLMs are able to do quite a bit more than filling the gaps and completion. They can edit multiple files.

    Yet, they’re unreliable, as they hallucinate all the time. Debugging LLM-generated code is a new skill, and it’s up to you to decide to learn it or not. I see quite an even split among devs. I think it’s worth it, though once it took me two hours to find a very obscure bug in LLM-generated code.

    • sudneo@lemm.ee
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      7 hours ago

      Humans are notoriously worse at tasks that have to do with reviewing than they are at tasks that have to do with creating. Editing an article is more boring and painful than writing it. Understanding and debugging code is much harder than writing it etc., observing someone cooking to spot mistakes is more boring than cooking etc.

      This also fights with the attention required to perform those tasks, which means a higher ratio of reviewing vs creating tasks leads to lower quality output because attention is depleted at some point and mistakes slip in. All this with the additional “bonus” to have to pay for the tool AND the human reviewing while also wasting tons of water and energy. I think it’s wise to ask ourselves whether this makes sense at all.

      • brie@programming.dev
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        2 hours ago

        To make sense of that, figure out what pays more observing/editing or cooking/writing. Big shekels will make boring parts exciting

    • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      If you consider debugging broken LLM-generated code to be a skill… sure, go for it. But, since generated code is able to use tons of unknown side effects and other seemingly (for humans) random stuff to achieve its goal, I’d rather take the other approach, where it takes a human half an hour to write the code that some LLM could generate in seconds, and not have to learn how to parse random mumbo jumbo from a machine, while getting a working result.

      Writing code is far from being the longest part of the job; and you gingerly decided that making the tedious part even more tedious is a great idea to shorten the already short part of it…

      • brie@programming.dev
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        2 hours ago

        It’s similar to fixing code written by interns. Why hire interns at all, eh?

        Is it faster to generate then debug or write everything? Needs to be properly tested. At the very least many devs have the perception of being faster, and perception sells.

        It actually makes writing web apps less tedious. The longest part of a dev job is pretending to work actually, but that’s no different from any office jerb.