I'm gonna take this comment, blow it up to poster size, and put it in my office, right in front of my webcam so I can watch my boss squint trying to read it.
Comment on Does AI need to be perfect to replace jobs?
TehPers@beehaw.org 1 day ago
These tools are meant to replace inexperience with incompetence, and the beancounters at some clients are likely satisfied those words look similar enough to pass muster.
This seems like it pretty much sums things up from my experience.
We’re encouraged (coughrequiredcough) to use LLMs at work. So I tried.
There are things they can do. Sometimes. But you know what they can’t do? Be liable for a fuck up.
When I ask a coworker a question, if they confidently answer wrong, they fucked up, not me. When I ask a LLM? The LLM isn’t liable, it’s me for not verifying it. If I’m verifying anyway, why am I using the LLM?
They fuck up often enough that I can’t put my credibility on the line over speedy slop. People at work consider me to be a good programmer (don’t ask me how, I guess the bar is low lol). Imagine if my code was just whatever an LLM shat out. It’d be the same exact quality as all of my other coworkers who use whatever their LLM shat out. No difference in quality.
And we would all be liable when the LLMs fucked up. We would learn something. We would, not the LLM. And the LLM will make the same exact fuck up the next time.
HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth 1 day ago
GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
Validating output should be much easier than generating it yourself. P≠NP.
This is especially true in contexts where the LLM provides citations. If the AI is good, then all you need to do is check the citations. (Most AI tools are shit, though; avoid any that can’t provide good, accurate citations when applicable.)
Consider that all scientific papers go through peer review, and any decent-sized org will have regular code reviews as well.
From the perspective of a senior software engineer, validating code that could very well be ruinously bad is nothing new. Validation and testing is retired whether it was written by an LLM or some dude who agent two weeks at a coding “boot camp”.
hazelnoot@beehaw.org 1 day ago
This is very much not true in some domains, like software development. Code is much harder to read than it is to write, so verifying the output of a coding AI usually takes more time (or at least more cognitive effort) than if you’d just written the code yourself.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
If the AI is writing ALL the code for an entire application it would be a problem, but as an assistant to a programmer, if it spits out a single line or even a small function, you can read it over very quickly to validate it before moving on to the next component.
TehPers@beehaw.org 1 day ago
This isn’t how we’re being asked to use it. People are doing demos about how Cursor or whatever did the bootstrapping and entire POC for them. And we already know there’s nothing more permanent than a POC.
GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
Yeah, that’s true for a subset of code. But for others, the hardest parts happen in the brain, not in the files. Writing readable code is very very important, especially when you are working with larger teams. Lots of people cut corners here and elsewhere in coding, though. Including, like, every startup I’ve ever seen.
There’s a lot of gruntwork in coding, and LLMs are very good at the gruntwork. But coding is also an art and a science and they’re not good at that at high levels (same with visual art and “real” science; think of the code equivalent of seven deformed fingers).
I don’t mean to hand-wave the problems away. I know that people are going to push the limits far beyond reason, and I know it’s going to lead to monumental fuckups. I know that because it’s been true for my entire career.