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Comment by lobochrome | Hacker News Reader

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lobochrome·

Object-oriented languages provide little value because a programmer’s job is to think

Memory-safe languages provide little value because a programmer’s job is to think

…

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Using deterministic methods as counter arguments about a probabilistic one. Something apples, something oranges….

Now this isn't a killer argument, but your examples are about readability and safety, respectively - the quality of the result. LLMs seem to be more about shoveling the same or worse crap faster.

Have you tried an AI coding assistant, or is that just the impression you get?

I have seen the results of other people. Code LLMs seem to do some annoying stuff more quickly than manually and are sometimes able to improve prose in comments and such. But they also mess up when it gets moderately difficult, especially when there are "long distance" connections between pieces. That and the probably seductive (to some) ability to crank out working, but repetitive or partially nonsensical code, is what I call shoveling crap faster.

I dunno what to tell you, I am able to get consistently good quality work out of eg 3.7 sonnet and it’d saved me a ton of time. Garbage in garbage out, maybe the people you’ve observed don’t know how to write good prompts.

I guess I should play around with that one then. My general impression was that we're already in the diminishing returns part of the sigmoid curve (calendar time or coefficient array size vs quality) for LLMs, until there's maybe a change other than making them bigger.

Not comparable at all.

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