LLMs are still waiting for their autocomplete moment: when they become an extension of the keyboard and complete our thoughts so fast, that i could write this article in 2 minutes. That will feel magical.
The speed is currently missing
Just today I generate U-Net code for a certain scenario. I had to tweak some parameters, at the end I got it working in <1hr.
This is my biggest fear with everyone adopting LLMs without considering the consequences.
In the past, I used "Do I have to write a lot of boilerplate here?" as a sort of litmus test for figuring out when to refactor. If I spend the entire day just writing boilerplate, I'm 99% sure I'm doing the wrong thing, at least most of the time.
But now, junior developers won't even get the intuition that if they're spending the entire day just typing boilerplate something is wrong, instead they'll just get the LLM to do it and there is no careful thoughts/reflections about the design and architecture.
Of course, reflection is still possible, but I'm afraid it won't be as natural and "in your face" which kind of forces you to learn it, instead it'll only be a thing for people who consider it in the first place.
The refactor will impact the developer. Maybe the code is now more maintainable, or easier to integrate, or easier to test. But this is where I expect LLMs will make a lot of progress - - they will not need clean, well structured code. So the refactor, in the long run, is not useful to a developer with an LLM sidekick.
Fwiw, most of the time I like writing code and I don't enjoy wading through LLM-generated code to see if it got it right. So the idea of using LLMs as reviewers resonates. I don't like writing tests though so I would happily have it write all of those.
But I do wonder if eventually it won't make sense to ever write code and it will turn into a pastime.
Yeah it matters because it is almost guaranteed that eventually a human will have to interact with the code directly so it should still be good quality code
> But I do wonder if eventually it won't make sense to ever write code and it will turn into a pastime
Even the fictional super-AI of Star Trek wasn't so good that the engineers didn't have to deeply understand the underlying work that it produced.
Tons of Trek episodes deal with the question of "if the technology fails, how do the humans who rely on it adapt?"
In the fictional stories we see people who are absolute masters of their domain solve the problems and win the day
In reality we have glorified chatbots, nowhere near the abilities of the fictional super-AI, and we already have people asking "do people even need to master their domains anymore?"
I dunno about you but I find it pretty discouraging
same :)
Yes AI makes mistakes, so do humans very often.
> AI can solve math puzzles better than 99.9% of population
So can a calculator.
I've studied electronic engineering and then switched to software engineering as a career, and I can say the only time I've been exposed to math puzzles were in academic settings. The knowledge is nice and help with certain problem solving, but you can be pretty sure I will reach out to a textbook and a calculator before trying to brute-force one such puzzle.
The most important thing in my daily life is understand the given task, do it correctly, and report about what I've done.
Puzzle solving is only for when information are not available (reverse engineering, closed systems,...) but there's a lot of information out there for the majority of tasks. I'm amazed when people spend hours trying to vibe code something, where they could spend just a few minutes reading about the system and comes up with a working solution (or find something that already works).
While I do see this argument made quite frequently, doesn't any professional effort center in procedures employed particularly to avoid mistakes? Isn't this really the point of professional work (including professional liabilities)?
I remember.... I turned it off immediately.
Hope the Next Big Thing (TM) is the Electric Monk.
I feel like the opposite/something else is missing. I can write lots of text quickly, if I just write down my unfiltered stream of thoughts, both together with and without an LLM, but what's the point?
What takes really long time, is making a large text contain just the important parts. Saying less takes longer time, at least for me, but hopefully saves the time and effort for people reading it. At least that's the idea.
The quote "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter" comes to mind.
At that point any other human being will likely also have one to scan incoming text.
I’m OK waiting 10 minutes with o1-pro, but I want a deep insight into the issue I’m brainstorming. Hopefully GPT-5 will deliver.