• Pennomi@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    37
    ·
    2 months ago

    To be fair, if I wrote 3000 new lines of code in one shot, it probably wouldn’t run either.

    LLMs are good for simple bits of logic under around 200 lines of code, or things that are strictly boilerplate. People who are trying to force it to do things beyond that are just being silly.

    • wischi@programming.dev
      cake
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      Practically all LLMs aren’t good for any logic. Try to play ASCII tic tac toe against it. All GPT models lost against my four year old niece and I wouldn’t trust her writing production code 🤣

      Once a single model (doesn’t have to be a LLM) can beat Stockfish in chess, AlphaGo in Go, my niece in tic tac toe and can one-shot (on the surface, scratch-pad allowed) a Rust program that compiles and works, than we can start thinking about replacing engineers.

      Just take a look at the dotnet runtime source code where Microsoft employees currently try to work with copilot, which writes PRs with errors like forgetting to add files to projects. Write code that doesn’t compile, fix symptoms instead of underlying problems, etc. (just take a look yourself).

      I don’t say that AI (especially AGI) can’t replace humans. It definitely can and will, it’s just a matter of time, but state of the Art LLMs are basically just extremely good “search engines” or interactive versions of “stack overflow” but not good enough to do real “thinking tasks”.

      • Pennomi@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        2 months ago

        Cherry picking the things it doesn’t do well is fine, but you shouldn’t ignore the fact that it DOES do some things easily also.

        Like all tools, use them for what they’re good at.

        • wischi@programming.dev
          cake
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          2 months ago

          I don’t think it’s cherry picking. Why would I trust a tool with way more complex logic, when it can’t even prevent three crosses in a row? Writing pretty much any software that does more than render a few buttons typically requires a lot of planning and thinking and those models clearly don’t have the capability to plan and think when they lose tic tac toe games.

            • wischi@programming.dev
              cake
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              9
              ·
              edit-2
              2 months ago

              A drill press (or the inventors) don’t claim that it can do that, but with LLMs they claim to replace humans on a lot of thinking tasks. They even brag with test benchmarks, claim Bachelor, Master and Phd level intelligence, call them “reasoning” models, but still fail to beat my niece in tic tac toe, which by the way doesn’t have a PhD in anything 🤣

              LLMs are typically good in things that happened a lot during training. If you are writing software there certainly are things which the LLM saw a lot of during training. But this actually is the biggest problem, it will happily generate code that might look ok, even during PR review but might blow up in your face a few weeks later.

              If they can’t handle things they even saw during training (but sparsely, like tic tac toe) it wouldn’t be able to produce code you should use in production. I wouldn’t trust any junior dev that doesn’t set their O right next to the two Xs.

              • Pennomi@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                2 months ago

                Sure, the marketing of LLMs is wildly overstated. I would never argue otherwise. This is entirely a red herring, however.

                I’m saying you should use the tools for what they’re good at, and don’t use them for what they’re bad at. I don’t see why this is controversial at all. You can personally decide that they are good for nothing. Great! Nobody is forcing you to use AI in your work. (Though if they are, you should find a new employer.)

                • wischi@programming.dev
                  cake
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  2 months ago

                  Totally agree with that and I don’t think anybody would see that as controversial. LLMs are actually good in a lot of things, but not thinking and typically not if you are an expert. That’s why LLMs know more about the anatomy of humans than I do, but probably not more than most people with a medical degree.

    • Opisek@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      2 months ago

      Perhaps 5 LOC. Maybe 3. And even then I’ll analyze every single character in wrote. And then I will in fact find bugs. Most often it hallucinates some functions that would be fantastic to use - if they existed.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        2 months ago

        My guess is what’s going on is there’s tons of psuedo code out there that looks like it’s a real language but has functions that don’t exist as placeholders and the LLM noticed the pattern to the point where it just makes up functions, not realizing they need to be implemented (because LLMs don’t realize things but just pattern match very complex patterns).

    • iAvicenna@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      2 months ago

      I am on you with this one. It is also very helpful in argument heavy libraries like plotly. If I ask a simple question like “in plotly how do I do this and that to the xaxis” etc it generally gives correct answers, saving me having to do internet research for 5-10 minutes or read documentations for functions with 1000 inputs. I even managed to get it to render a simple scene of cloud of points with some interactivity in 3js after about 30 minutes of back and forth. Not knowing much javascript, that would take me at least a couple hours. So yeah it can be useful as an assistant to someone who already knows coding (so the person can vet and debug the code).

      Though if you weigh pros and cons of how LLMs are used (tons of fake internet garbage, tons of energy used, very convincing disinformation bots), I am not convinced benefits are worth the damages.

  • SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    34
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    Watching the serious people trying to use AI to code gives me the same feeling as the cybertruck people exploring the limits of their car. XD

    “It’s terrible and I should hate it, but gosh it it isn’t just so cool”

    I wish i could get so excited over disappointing garbage

  • LanguageIsCool@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    2 months ago

    I’ve heard that a Claude 4 model generating code for an infinite amount of time will eventually simulate a monkey typing out Shakespeare

  • markstos@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    2 months ago

    This weekend I successfully used Claude to add three features in a Rust utility I had wanted for a couple years. I had opened issue requests, but no else volunteered. I had tried learning Rust, Wayland and GTK to do it myself, but the docs at the time weren’t great and the learning curve was steep. But Claude figured it all out pretty quick.

  • Owl@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    2 months ago

    well, it only took 2 years to go from the cursed will smith eating spaghetti video to veo3 which can make completely lifelike videos with audio. so who knows what the future holds

  • antihumanitarian@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    2 months ago

    I’ve used it extensively, almost $100 in credits, and generally it could one shot everything I threw at it. However: I gave it architectural instructions and told it to use test driven development and what test suite to use. Without the tests yeah it wouldn’t work, and a decent amount of the time is cleaning up mistakes the tests caught. The same can be said for humans, though.

  • chunes@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    2 months ago

    Laugh it up while you can.

    We’re in the “haha it can’t draw hands!” phase of coding.

    • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      2 months ago

      someone drank the koolaid.

      LLMs will never code for two reasons.

      one, because they only regurgitate facsimiles of code. this is because the models are trained to ingest content and provide an interpretation of the collection of their content.

      software development is more than that and requires strategic thought and conceptualization, both of which are decades away from AI at best.

      two, because the prevalence of LLM generated code is destroying the training data used to build models. think of it like making a copy of a copy of a copy, et cetera.

      the more popular it becomes the worse the training data becomes. the worse the training data becomes the weaker the model. the weaker the model, the less likely it will see any real use.

      so yeah. we’re about 100 years from the whole “it can’t draw its hands” stage because it doesn’t even know what hands are.

      • chunes@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        This is just your ego talking. You can’t stand the idea that a computer could be better than you at something you devoted your life to. You’re not special. Coding is not special. It happened to artists, chess players, etc. It’ll happen to us too.

        I’ll listen to experts who study the topic over an internet rando. AI model capabilities as yet show no signs of slowing their exponential growth.

        • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          2 months ago

          you’re a fool. chess has rules and is boxed into those rules. of course it’s prime for AI.

          art is subjective, I don’t see the appeal personally, but I’m more of a baroque or renaissance fan.

          I doubt you will but if you believe in what you say then this will only prove you right and me wrong.

          what is this?

          1000001583

          once you classify it, why did you classify it that way? is it because you personally have one? did you have to rule out what it isn’t before you could identify what it could be? did you compare it to other instances of similar subjects?

          now, try to classify it as someone who doesn’t have these. someone who has never seen one before. someone who hasn’t any idea what it could be used for. how would you identify what it is? how it’s used? are there more than one?

          now, how does AI classify it? does it comprehend what it is, even though it lacks a physical body? can it understand what it’s used for? how it feels to have one?

          my point is, AI is at least 100 years away from instinctively knowing what a hand is. I doubt you had to even think about it and your brain automatically identified it as a hand, the most basic and fundamentally important features of being a human.

          if AI cannot even instinctively identify a hand as a hand, it’s not possible for it to write software, because writing is based on human cognition and is entirely driven on instinct.

          like a master sculptor, we carve out the words from the ether to perform tasks that not only are required, but unseen requirements that lay beneath the surface that are only known through nuance. just like the sculptor that has to follow the veins within the marble.

          the AI you know today cannot do that, and frankly the hardware of today can’t even support AI in achieving that goal, and it never will because of people like you promoting a half baked toy as a tool to replace nuanced human skills. only for this toy to poison pill the only training data available, that’s been created through nuanced human skills.

          I’ll just add, I may be an internet rando to you but you and your source are just randos to me. I’m speaking from my personal experience in writing software for over 25 years along with cleaning up all this AI code bullshit for at least two years.

          AI cannot code. AI writes regurgitated facsimiles of software based on it’s limited dataset. it’s impossible for it to make decisions based on human nuance and can only make calculated assumptions based on the available dataset.

          I don’t know how much clearer I have to be at how limited AI is.

        • wischi@programming.dev
          cake
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          2 months ago

          Coding isn’t special you are right, but it’s a thinking task and LLMs (including reasoning models) don’t know how to think. LLMs are knowledgeable because they remembered a lot of the data and patterns of the training data, but they didn’t learn to think from that. That’s why LLMs can’t replace humans.

          That does certainly not mean that software can’t be smarter than humans. It will and it’s just a matter of time, but to get there we likely have AGI first.

          To show you that LLMs can’t think, try to play ASCII tic tac toe (XXO) against all those models. They are completely dumb even though it “saw” the entire Wikipedia article on how xxo works during training, that it’s a solved game, different strategies and how to consistently draw - but still it can’t do it. It loses most games against my four year old niece and she doesn’t even play good/perfect xxo.

          I wouldn’t trust anything, which is claimed to do thinking tasks, that can’t even beat my niece in xxo, with writing firmware for cars or airplanes.

          LLMs are great if used like search engines or interactive versions of Wikipedia/Stack overflow. But they certainly can’t think. For now, but likely we’ll need different architectures for real thinking models than LLMs have.

    • Soleos@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      2 months ago

      AI bad. But also, video AI started with will Will Smith eating spaghetti just a couple years ago.

      We keep talking about AI doing complex tasks right now and it’s limitations, then extrapolating its development linearly. It’s not linear and it’s not in one direction. It’s a exponential and rhizomatic process. Humans always over-estimate (ignoring hard limits) and under-estimate (thinking linearly) how these things go. With rocketships, with internet/social media, and now with AI.