Are LLMs capable of writing *good* code? - eviltoast

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.

  • cley_faye@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    2 months ago

    For repetitive tasks, it can almost automatically get a first template you write by hand, and extrapolate with multiple variations.

    Beyond that… not really. Anything beyond single line completion quickly devolves into either something messy, non working, or worse, working but not as intended. For extremely common cases it will work fine; but extremely common cases are either moved out in shared code, or take less time to write than to “generate” and check.

    I’ve been using code completion/suggestion on the regular, and it had times where I was pleasantly surprised by what it produced, but even for these I had to look after it and fix some things. And while I can’t quantify how often it happened, there are a lot of times where it’s convincing gibberish.

    • anytimesoon@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 months ago

      I’ve also had some decent luck when using a new/unfamiliar language by asking it to make the code I wrote more idiomatic.

      It’s been a nice way to learn some tricks I probably wouldn’t have bothered with before