Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

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Impossible. In order to fix a bug, you need to do abstract interpretation or something equivalent. Language models simply can't do that. And even the best bug report will not tell you what you need to do to fix it.

Of course, there are other change requests: Change a color here, store this information alongside that record, modify that output, etc. But even those changes can very quickly spiral out of control. Color models, database schema compatibility, pretty printing ...

No, I think the idea that LLMs take over programmers jobs is born out of a complete misunderstanding of both. Of course that doesn't mean that no one will try to do it. I bet people will even report success in doing it, simply because their bonus depends on it, but I don't think it will ever really work.

What might happen though is that LLMs replace many of the programs we write nowadays. After all, who needs a web browser when a LLM can give you a summary in natural language?

It’s pretty funny that you think this is impossible based on some theoretical idea of what LLMs are. Playing with LLMs today quickly demonstrates how things that shouldn’t be possible in theory are trivial in practice. In a few years, who knows where we’ll be.

You have obviously no clue what "theory" means in that context. Playing with LLMs has so far demonstrated very little. Yes, these language models are subjectively impressive, but that's exactly what they have been designed to be. Usefulness is a completely different metric and it will be much harder to demonstrate convincingly.

From a pure programming point of view, the situation is simple: Even if a LLM could translate human language into working code, it just becomes another compiler and the input just another, admittedly novel, kind of programming language.

Your hyperbolic dismissal in the face of the existing usefulness of these models is kinda sad, if understandable. I mean, I get it, it’s kinda terrifying, and that can easily manifest as the kind of overly confident dismissal that you’re demonstrating here. But it just doesn’t match reality. I’ve been building software for 25 years, across multiple platforms and every kind of organization under the sun, and I’m using GPT4 to extreme usefulness right now, as are many others. And we’re just scratching the surface.

But by all means, continue to emphatically insist that LLMs have not demonstrated usefulness, or that they’ll never be able to “program on their own”.

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