> If you work in a field where you have to get things right, and it's more work to double check and then fix everything done by the LLM, they're worse than useless.
Most programmers understand reading code is often harder than writing it. Especially when someone else wrote the code. I'm a bit amused by the cognitive dissonance of programmers understanding that and then praising code handed to them by an LLM.
It's not that LLMs are useless for programming (or other technical tasks) but they're very junior practitioners. Even when they get "smarter" with reasoning or more parameters their nature of confabulation means they can't be fully trusted in the way their proponents suggest we trust them.
It's not that people don't make mistakes but they often make reasonable mistakes. LLMs make unreasonable mistakes at random. There's no way to predict the distribution of their mistakes. I can learn a human junior developer sucks at memory management or something. I can ask them to improve areas they're weak in and check those areas of their work in more detail.
I have to spend a lot of time reviewing all output from LLMs because there's rarely rhyme or reason to their errors. They save me a bunch of typing but replace a lot of my savings with reviews and debugging.
Most programmers understand reading code is often harder than writing it. Especially when someone else wrote the code. I'm a bit amused by the cognitive dissonance of programmers understanding that and then praising code handed to them by an LLM.
It's not that LLMs are useless for programming (or other technical tasks) but they're very junior practitioners. Even when they get "smarter" with reasoning or more parameters their nature of confabulation means they can't be fully trusted in the way their proponents suggest we trust them.
It's not that people don't make mistakes but they often make reasonable mistakes. LLMs make unreasonable mistakes at random. There's no way to predict the distribution of their mistakes. I can learn a human junior developer sucks at memory management or something. I can ask them to improve areas they're weak in and check those areas of their work in more detail.
I have to spend a lot of time reviewing all output from LLMs because there's rarely rhyme or reason to their errors. They save me a bunch of typing but replace a lot of my savings with reviews and debugging.