I’m not saying that LLMs can’t be useful, but I do think it’s a darn shame that we’ve given up on creating tools that deterministically perform a task. We know we make mistakes and take a long time to do things. And so we developed tools to decrease our fallibility to zero, or to allow us to achieve the same output faster. But that technology needs to be reliable; and pushing the envelope of that reliability has been a cornerstone of human innovation since time immemorial. Except here, with the “AI” craze, where we have abandoned that pursuit. As the saying goes, “to err is human”; the 21st-century update will seemingly be, “and it’s okay if technology errs too”. If any other foundational technology had this issue, it would be sitting unused on a shelf.
What if your compiler only generated the right code 99% of the time? Or, if your car only started 9 times out of 10? All of these tools can be useful, but when we are so accepting of a lack of reliability, more things go wrong, and potentially at larger and larger scales and magnitudes. When (if some folks are to believed) AI is writing safety-critical code for an early-warning system, or deciding when to use bombs, or designing and validating drugs, what failure rate is tolerable?
This does not follow. By your own assumptions, getting you 80% of the way there in 10% of the time would save you 18% of the overall time, if the first 80% typically takes 20% of the time. 18% time reduction in a given task is still an incredibly massive optimization that's easily worth $200/month for a professional.
160 hours a month * $100/hr programmer * 9% = $1400 savings, easily enough to justify $200/month.
Even if 1/10th of the time it fails, that is still ~8% or $1200 savings.
For tasks where bullshitting or regurgitating common idioms is key, it works rather well and indeed takes you 80% or even close to 100% of the way there. For tasks that require technical precision and genuine originality, it’s hopeless.
So far, given my range of projects, I have seen it struggle with lower level mobile stuff and hardware (ESP32 + BLE + HID).
For things like web (front/back), DB, video games (web and Unity), it does work pretty well (at least 80% there on average).
And I'm talking of the free version, not this $200/mo one.
People around here feel seriously threatened by ML models. It makes no sense, but then, neither does defending the Luddites, and people around here do that, too.
I'm talking of the generally available one, haven't had the chance to try this new version.