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> I’ve found LLM code to be of poor quality

Yes. That was my experience with most human-produced code I ran into professionally, too.

> In fact try this - ask an LLM to generate some code then reply with “isn’t there a simpler, more maintainable, and straightforward way to do this?”

Yes, that sometimes works with humans as well. Although you usually need to provide more specific feedback to nudge them in the right track. It gets tiring after a while, doesn't it?

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dartos 3 days ago | parent [-]

What is the point of your argument?

I keep seeing people say “yeah well I’ve seen humans that can’t do that either.”

What’s the point you’re trying to make?

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david-gpu 3 days ago | parent [-]

The point is that the person I responded to criticized LLMs for making the exact sort of mistakes that professional programmers make all the time:

> I’ve found LLM code to be of poor quality. I think that has to do with being a very experienced and skilled programmer. What the LLM produce is at best the top answer in stack overflow-level skill. The top answers on stack overflow are typically not optimal solutions

Most professional developers are unable to produce code up to the standard of "the top answer in stack overflow" that the commenter was complaining about, with the additional twist that most developers' breadth of knowledge is going to be limited to a very narrow range of APIs/platforms/etc. whereas these LLMs are able to be comparable to decent programmers in just about any API/language/platform, all at once.

I've written code for thirty years and I wish I had the breadth and depth of knowledge of the free version of ChatGPT, even if I can outsmart it in narrow domains. It is already very decent and I haven't even tried more advanced models like o1-preview.

Is it perfect? No. But it is arguably better than most programmers in at least some aspects. Not every programmer out there is Fabrice Bellard.

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dartos 3 days ago | parent [-]

But LLMs aren’t people. And people do more than just generate code.

The comparison is weird and dehumanizing.

I, personally, have never worked with someone who consistently puts out code that is as bad as LLM generated code either.

> Most professional developers are unable to produce code up to the standard of "the top answer in stack overflow"

How could you possibly know that?

All these types of arguments come from a belief that your fellow human is effectively useless.

It’s sad and weird.

	▲	david-gpu 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		>> > Most professional developers are unable to produce code up to the standard of "the top answer in stack overflow" > How could you possibly know that? I worked at four multinationals and saw a bunch of their code. Most of it wasn't "the top answer in stack overflow". Was some of the code written by some of the people better than that? Sure. And a lot of it wasn't, in my opinion. > All these types of arguments come from a belief that your fellow human is effectively useless. Not at all. I think the top answers in stack overflow were written by humans, after all. > It’s sad and weird. You are entitled to your own opinion, no doubt about it.