Re:Human coders are still better than LLMs
by layer8 on Thursday May 29, 2025 @04:54PM
(#44130304)
Programmers derided programming languages (too inefficient, too inflexible, too dumbing-down) when assembly was still the default. That phenomenon is at the same time entirely to be expected but also says little about the actual qualities of the new technology.
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If you have something that generated 20 lines of assembly that takes 100x times more than the 2 lines of clever instructions you know, you'd have the same stance even if the higher level was easier to use. Then those kind of performance tricks ceases to matter. But reliability still do. And the reasons we use higher and higher level of programming languages is because they increase reliability and simplicity (at the cost of performance, but we're happy to pay those).
LLMs output are unreliable and productivity is still not proven for an end to end engineering cycle.
You are arguing based on the merits of the technology, which is fine, but wasn't my point. I was arguing that derision tends to happen no matter what, and thus doesn't indicate much about the merits of the technology one way or the other.
If the idea has staying power, then derision tends to be followed by hatred or anger. We're already seeing quite a bit of hatred and anger toward AI. I think even the people who are ridiculing AI currently would agree with the statement, "There will be more anger toward AI in the near future." As in, they already know it's here to stay, whether they admit it to themselves or not.