No, they're like an extremely experienced and knowledgeable senior colleague – who drinks heavily on the job. Overconfident, forgetful, sloppy, easily distracted. But you can hire so many of them, so cheaply, and they don't get mad when you fire them!
And if you push back on that insanity, they'll smile and nod and agree with you and in the next sentence, go right back to pushing that nonsense.
They are extremely shallow, even compared to a junior developer. But extremely broad, even compared to the most experienced developer. They type real fuckin fast compared to anyone on earth, but they need to be told what to do much more carefully than anyone on earth.
LLM did help a lot to get some busy work out of the way, but it's difficult to know when you need to jump out of the LLM loop and go old skool.
Unrelated to software but recently I wanted to revive an old dumbphone I haven't used since 2014 and apparently I had it password protected and forgot the password and wanted to factory reset it. I found the exact model of the phone and google had only content farm articles that didn't help me at all but Gemini gave me the perfect solution first try. I went to google first because I had no faith in Gemini since to me it seemed like a pretty obscure question but guess I was wrong.
AI is like a super advanced senior wearing a blindfold. It knows almost everything, it's super fast, and it gets confused pretty quickly about things after you tell it.
Ask it for things that many people get wrong or just do badly, or can be mistakenly likened to a popular thing in a way that produces a wrong result, and it'll often err.
The trick is having an awareness of what correct solutions are prevalent in training data and what the bulk of accessible code used for training probably doesn't have many examples of. And this experience is hard to substitute for.
Juniors therefore use LLMs in a bumbling fashion and are productive either by sheer luck, or because they're more likely to ask for common things and so stay in a lane with the model.
A senior developer who develops a good intuition for when the tool is worth using and when not can be really efficient. Some senior developers however either overestimate or underestimate the tool based on wrong expectations and become really inefficient with them.
They follow directions for maybe an hour and then go off and fix random shit because they forgot what their main task was.
They'll tell you to your face how great your ideas were, and that you're absolutely right about something, then go implement it completely incorrectly.
They add comments to literally everything even when you ask them to stop. But they also ignore said comments sometimes.
Maybe they are kinda like us lol.
Individual sentences and paragraphs may mostly work, but it's an edifice built on sand out of poorly constructed bricks plus mortar with the wrong proportions (or entirely wrong ingredients).
LLM output is "truthy" - it looks like it might be true, and sometimes it will even be accurate (see also, "stopped clock") but depending on it is foolish because what's generating the output doesn't actually understand what it's putting out - it's just generating output that looks like the kind of thing you've requested.
have you ever managed an offshore team. holy cow
I figured there's probably a ton more logical issues and deleted it immediately
I asked Claude to design me a UI, and it made a lovely one... but I wanted a web ui. It very happily through away all its work and made a brand new web UI.
I can't imagine any employee being that quick to just move on after something like that.
“libFakeCall doesn’t exist. Use libRealCall instead of libFakeCall.”
“You’re absolutely correct. I apologize for blah blah blah blah. Here’s the updated code with libRealCall instead. :[…]”
“You just replaced the libFakeCall reference with libRealCall but didn’t update the calls themselves. Re-write it and cite the docs. “
“Sorry about the confusion! I’ve found these calls in the libRealCall docs. Here’s the new code and links to the docs.”
“That’s the same code but with links to the libRealCall docs landing page.”
“You’re absolutely correct.” It appears that these calls belong to another library with that functionality:” looks totally plausible but hallucinated libFakeCall.
For all the hot air I hear about the user having to give the system the proper context to give you good answers - does anyone claim to have a solution for dealing with such a belligerent approach to bullshit?
They are by no means useless, but once they fall into that hole, there's no further value in interrogating them.
I think the programming profession overvalues experience over skill. However, when I was young I had no appreciation for what the benefits of experience are... including not writing terrible code.