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Comment by mrbungie | Hacker News Reader

> The code I generate is usually better than what I'd do by hand.

I'm always baffled by this. If you can't do it that well by hand, how can you discriminate its quality so confidently?

I get there is a artist/art consumer analogy to be made (i.e. you can see a piece is good without knowing how to paint), but I'm not convinced it is transferrable to code.

Also, not really my experience when dealing with IaC or (complex) data related code.

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You have misinterpreted GP's "better than what I would do" as "better than what I could do".

That would be a more plaussible explanation. Not sure if that disambiguation can be inferred from the comment though.

It’s clear from the original comment that’s what they mean. (Literally that’s what the comment says)

You're forgetting that code quality also requires time. Developers make tradeoffs all the time on how much time to invest into improving the quality of what they write, for both new and existing code. When someone claims that LLMs can produce higher-quality code it can include quality levels that may be unjustifiably slow to hand-craft depending on constraints and needs.

Related - agentic LLMs may be slow to produce output but they are parallelizable by an individual unlike hand-written work.

I get that. I'm exclusively talking about code quality verification after it being coded by a human or an LLM, in fact I don't really care by whom. Mainly because I do care about introducing tech debt and/or hidden balloning costs.

I can do it by hand but it takes time.

With AI the extra quality and polish is basically free and instantaneous.

Ah, alright, that makes a lot more sense, like another poster said I read "'d" as "could".

Point still remains for junior and semi-senior devs though, or any dev trying to leap over a knowledge barrier with LLMs. Emphasis on good pipelines and human (eventually maybe also LLM based) peer-reviews will be very important in the years to come.

You underestimate how lazy people are. I always take shortcuts and skip taking edge cases into account. LLMs have no problem writing tedious guards and creating abstractions without hacks, which means the code becomes more robust than if I would do it by hand.

What an odd question. For the exact same reason people who write prose professionally usually have someone else edit their work: because editing your own work is harder, and everybody slips up sometimes.

I didn't find it odd at all and it seems more odd to liken an LLM to a human editor.

I'm not getting this analogy. Editors can't normally discriminate if the content itself is good (after all, the writer is the SME), but rather, only perfect its form (syntax, grammar, etc).

Well-written bullshit in perfect prose is still bullshit.

ehhhhhhh yeah but this is like hiring Reddit to do your prose editing, considering generated code is slightly worse than what you'd find on r/programming

You can believe that or not believe that without changing the implication of the previous question, which was that someone who routinely slips while writing code would be incapable of determining whether the LLM got it right. Obviously not.

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