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
It’s pretty unbeatable to use LLMs for fast prototyping and query generation, but “vibe coding” is not something just anybody can (or should) do.
It seems to me that the world of LLMs gives back at the quality you put in. If you ask it about eating rocks and putting glue on pizza then yes it’s a giant waste of money. If you can form a coherent question that you have a feeling for what the answer is like (especially related to programming) it’s easily worth the hype. Now if you are using it blindly to build or audit your code base that falls into the first category of “you should not be using this tool”.
Unfortunately, my view before and after the emergence of LLMs is that most people are just not that bright. Unique and valuable, sure, but when it comes to expertise it just isnt as common as the council of armchairs might lead you to believe.
I mostly agree with you, but I still don’t think it’s “worth the hype” even if you use it responsibly, since the hype is that it is somehow going to replace software devs (and other jobs), which is precisely what it can’t do. If you’re aware enough of its limitations to be using it as a productivity tool, as opposed to treating it as some kind of independent, thinking “expert”, then you’re already recognizing that it does not live up to anywhere near the hype that is being pushed by the big AI companies.