Comment by _pdp_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _pdp_ | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been using GitHub Copilot as my daily driver. It is now as indispensable as the Vim extension for VSCode. It doesn't write much new code for me and, frankly, it fails miserably at most tasks. However, it does a phenomenal job with auto-completion. So, while I still feel like I am in the driver's seat, it does help me achieve tremendously more by simply extending what I have already started.

But that should be no surprise. After all, LLMs simply complete the next token in a long sequence of text based on some probability outcome. A lot of the code is a sequence of patterns. So the LLM should be able to do well.

I feel that true coding agents are perhaps around the corner, but it seems to me that we are a couple of innovations away before this happens.

However, even with coding agents, there will be simply more people producing a lot more code (even non developers) which I believe will drive the demand for higher quality code or at least code that can be understood and proved by other humans. Thus, coding agents are just force-multipliers. Great developers will become greater. I wrote something about this here if you are interested: go.cbk.ai/divide. My $0.02.

I read you post, I am not sure I agree with:

> transforming a tool of empowerment into an amplifier of existing disparities.

Which disparity are we talking about? That of non-coders vs coders?

It used to be that someone who did not know how to code had zero chance of writing any program that runs.

Enabling these people to write code is a massive empowerment unlike any we have seen before. Hundreds of millions of people who had no chance of writing working code before will be able to do so if they wish. That's a lot of people reaching for lots of ideas. I doubt that genius and insanely productive programmer, would be able to outcompete all these competitors that previously did not exist.

I don't think we fully comprehend what this will mean in the future - but I doubt it amplifies disparity.

> Enabling these people to write code is a massive empowerment unlike any we have seen before. Hundreds of millions of people who had no chance of writing working code before will be able to do so if they wish.

They still are not able to code. They don’t understand a thing from the output. They cannot see right from wrong, or correct anything by themselves. Maybe at some occasions that kind of coding is useful, but not in professional setting.

It can be useful in learning, but so are all old school methods.

You get the most from LLMs when you are very good programmer - that is the OPs point.

These people who could have been talking to machines, now talk to AI companies who do the work for them. It's almost free today, but what will it cost once they need it to make money and they have no alternative ?

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