By “good” I mean code that is written professionally and concisely (and obviously works as intended). Apart from personal interest and understanding what the machine spits out, is there any legit reason anyone should learn advanced coding techniques? Specifically in an engineering perspective?
If not, learning how to write code seems a tad trivial now.
Great question.
Don’t buy the hype. LLMs can produce all kinds of useful things but they don’t know anything at all.
No LLM has ever engineered anything. And there’s
nosparse (concession to a good point made in response) current evidence that any AI ever will.Current learning models are like trained animals in a circus. They can learn to do any impressive thing you an imagine, by sheer rote repetition.
That means they can engineer a solution to any problem that has already been solved millions of times already. As long as the work has very little new/novel value and requires no innovation whatsoever, learning models do great work.
Horses and LLMs that solve advanced algebra don’t understand algebra at all. It’s a clever trick.
Understanding the problem and understanding how to politely ask the computer to do the right thing has always been the core job of a computer programmer.
The bit about “politely asking the computer to do the right thing” makes massive strides in convenience every decade or so. Learning models are another such massive stride. This is great. Hooray!
The bit about “understanding the problem” isn’t within the capabilities of any current learning model or AI, and there’s no current evidence that it ever will be.
Someday they will call the job “prompt engineering” and on that day it will still be the same exact job it is today, just with different bullshit to wade through to get it done.
I appreciate your candor, I had a feeling it was cock and bull but you’ve answered my question fully.