alt Hacker NewsIt's the uncanny valley of AI. It's still not quite good enough yet that you can trust it blindly on a big codebase, so you still have to read and understand everything - which is often harder than just writing it up yourself.
EDIT: don’t get me wrong. I still think AI is incredibly useful for a lot of tasks! But when implementing an architecturally hairy thing, I find it less stressful and equally quick to jump down to the editor level and use AI just for code completion.
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I'd say it's more about learning how to organize your work more efficiently.
If you think about a product like marble: it's something that most be chiseled out of time.
Some people can chisel better products: the AI is just a better chisel.
Sometime still has to guide the chisel and judge the art/product.
In our cases, the market judges products.
I think the speed/context size of the large models is a threshold. I've been using a local model and watching it do killer stuff, and also shit out useless things; all in real time, requiring active steering.
Your assumption is that LLMs will ever leave this uncanny valley.
Maybe unforeseen breakthroughs and different architectures are achieved. Given LLM fundamental shortcomings grounded in mathematics and information theory, I highly doubt they will and we will always need to deal with these issues in some capacity.
Pretty much, The one thing I use it for is as a sanity check, pretty much "Look at <SomeFile>, point out issues you see, summarise them tersely" and it'll spot stuff a code review by a human might have spotted (in the mythical land where people actually do code reviews properly and don't just flag a spelling mistake to "show they looked at it").
Beyond that I don't trust it at all and I still write all my code the meat sack way.
Trust is earned not given and it hasn't earned it yet.