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.

  • whyrat@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Hackers and hobbiests will persist despite any economics. Much of what they do I don’t see AI replacing, as AI creates based off of what it “knows”, which is mostly things it has previously ingested.

    We are not (yet?) at the point where LLM does anything other than put together code snippets it’s seen or derived. If you ask it to find a new attack vector or code dissimilar to something it’s seen before the results are poor.

    But the counterpoint every developer needs to keep in mind: AI will only get better. It’s not going to lose any of the current capabilities to generate code, and very likely will continue to expand on what it can accomplish. It’d be naive to assume it can never achieve these new capabilities… The question is just when & how much it costs (in terms of processing and storage).

    • recapitated@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Agree, and the point I always want to make is that any LLM or neural net or any other AI tech is going to be a mere component in a powerful product, rather than the entirety of the product.

      The way I think of it is that my brain is of little value without my body, and my person is of little value without my team at work. I don’t exist in a vacuum but I can be highly productive within my environment.