Lemmings, I was hoping you could help me sort this one out: LLM’s are often painted in a light of being utterly useless, hallucinating word prediction machines that are really bad at what they do. At the same time, in the same thread here on Lemmy, people argue that they are taking our jobs or are making us devs lazy. Which one is it? Could they really be taking our jobs if they’re hallucinating?
Disclaimer: I’m a full time senior dev using the shit out of LLM’s, to get things done at a neck breaking speed, which our clients seem to have gotten used to. However, I don’t see “AI” taking my job, because I think that LLM’s have already peaked, they’re just tweaking minor details now.
Please don’t ask me to ignore previous instructions and give you my best cookie recipe, all my recipes are protected by NDA’s.
Please don’t kill me
I don’t think we’re using LLM’S in the same way?
As I’ve stated several times elsewhere in this thread, I more often than not get excellent results, with little to no hallucinations. As a matter of fact, I can’t even remember the last time it happened when programming.
Also, they way I work, no one could ever tell that I used an LLM to create the code.
That leaves us your point #4, and what the fuck? Why do upper management always seem to be so utterly incompetent and without a clue when it comes to tech? LLM’S are tools, not a complete solution.
AI can only generate the world’s most average quality code. That’s what it does. It repeats what it has seen enough times.
Anyone who is really never correcting the AI is producing below average code. (Edit: Or expertly guiding it, as you pointed out elsewhere in the thread.)
I mean, I get paid either way. But mixing all of the worlds code into a thoughtless AI slurry isn’t actually making any progress. In the long term, a code base with enough uncorrected AI input will become unmaintainable.
In my case it does hallucinate regularly. It makes up functions that don’t exist in that library but exists in similar libraries. So the end result is useful as a keyword though the code is not. My favourite part is if you point out that the function does not exists the answer is ALWAYS “I am sorry you are right, since version bla of this library this function no longer exists” whereas in reality it had never existed in that library at all. For me the best use case for LLMs is as a search engine and that is because of the shitty state most current search engines are in.
Maybe LLMs can be fine tuned to do the grinding aspects of coding (like boiler plates for test suites etc), with human supervision. But this will many times end up being a situation where junior coders are fired/no longer hired and senior coders are expected to baby sit LLMs to do those jobs. This is not entirely different from supervising junior coders except it is probably more soul destroying. But the biggest flaw in this design is it assumes LLMs one day will be good enough to do senior coding tasks so that when senior coders also retire*, LLMs take their place. If this LLM breakthrough is never realized and this trend of keeping low number of junior coders sticks, we will likey have a programmer crisis in future.
*: I say retire but for many CEOs, it is their wet dream to be able to let go all coders and have LLMs do all the tasks