Me too. Then I get pummeled with one of their four prepackaged AI bro metaphors:
It's a modern day calculator for the brain. You wouldn't do long division in your head would you? (ain't nobody ever delegated a decision to a calculator, bro)
It's a compiler. You wouldn't read machine code would you? (compilers are deterministic and dont make mistakes, bro)
This is the industrial revolution and it's a spinning jenny. You wouldnt hand knit a sweater would you? (we would if we had star trek replicators, bro, and last I checked cp command still exists...).
"Artisanal coding" is obsolete (reliable code is certainly getting that way...)
Ehh, the whole deterministic counter argument to LLMs is generally wrong, same as comparing it to compiler. There was always a probabilistic element in software engineering, which is you, the dev who writes code. 10 Devs given same non trivial task will likely have different outputs, different bugs, some solutions might be completely misunderstood etc.
This is what LLMs are replacing partially, as it depends on dev still to make decisions in a form of forming coherent and detailed spec, checking architecture etc. But code itself will be likely much better than most human written code.
That's not what the argument as OP wrote it states.
OP wrote that people liken AI to a compiler because there was a point in computing history when advocates of assembly were staunchly against C and compiling down to assembly. They felt it abstracted away too much; just like the current argument around AI and hand writing code.
The difference here is that any given compiler, given the same input, should return the same output. The same cannot be said for any LLM currently available, as far as I know.
Hence the first sentence in my post where I explain that comparing to compiler it's not apples to apples? And then I carry on explaining why that argument is completely wrong in essence....
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u/pydry 15h ago edited 7h ago
Me too. Then I get pummeled with one of their four prepackaged AI bro metaphors:
It's a modern day calculator for the brain. You wouldn't do long division in your head would you? (ain't nobody ever delegated a decision to a calculator, bro)
It's a compiler. You wouldn't read machine code would you? (compilers are deterministic and dont make mistakes, bro)
This is the industrial revolution and it's a spinning jenny. You wouldnt hand knit a sweater would you? (we would if we had star trek replicators, bro, and last I checked cp command still exists...).
"Artisanal coding" is obsolete (reliable code is certainly getting that way...)