geekwithsoul

Source?

“clanker wanker” <-- chef’s kiss

“AI coding assistants feel productive because they give instant feedback. You type a prompt and code drops in right away. That loop feels like progress, the same reward you get from closing a ticket or fixing a failing test. The problem is that dopamine rewards activity in the editor, not working code in production.”

https://www.cerbos.dev/blog/productivity-paradox-of-ai-coding-assistants

I believe you are mistaken - I’m speaking about LLMs within the context of FOSS and coding as that’s the subject of OP’s post and the article they linked to. You may have thoughts about LLMs in general, but you don’t seem to be addressing their use (and abuse) when it comes to coding or giving them carte blanche when it comes access to FOSS repos. Because if you, as the article suggests, just bend over, you’re giving access to all LLMs, not just some hypothetical specially trained one.

A stark difference is that GUIs are designed with the same feature set as the CLI. Unlike an LLM, the GUI is not going to start suddenly making up data, offering nonexistent features, or straight up lying. The GUI is a more easily accessible interface that more or less behaves like the CLI. It’s like an orbital sander versus manual sanding - generally easier but you can also really fuck shut up if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Furthermore, coding is not merely clicking buttons or typing commands. You need to understand your language, your compiler, the intended runtime environment, etc., as well as best practices and then also have the purely human ability to create a new way of doing something. The LLM simply regurgitates what it’s been trained on without regard to the quality of that data - it can’t make value judgements on best approaches or even syntax, it’s just monkey-see, monkey-do. Hell, it can’t even sometimes differentiate between the correct syntaxes for different languages. In the end it gets you nothing but the illusion of convenience and the very real problem of non-functional, unmaintainable, and/or unoptimized code. It’s a fool’s bargain.

This presupposes that there is some real and tangible benefit to LLMs, but an explanation of that argument is never put forward. Sure, the dream is to have the magic LLM genie write you code that runs perfectly and does what you want, but now you have code you didn’t write and can’t maintain. So you have to rely on the LLM genie for that to, and sooner rather than later - no matter how well you’ve trained it - it’s going to run across something it can’t do. And then what? You have a pile of code you don’t understand and no idea yourself how to fix it yourself because you kept having the genie do it.

What about all of that is worth the theft of the work of others, the resource demands to train and run the LLMs, and the debasement of actual coders?

1. that’s literally one of the most bigoted comments I’ve ever seen in the fediverse

2. your comment is in English, a language so non-functional it’s the only one that had to have spelling bees to get kids to learn its asinine rules