alt Hacker News> This is hyperbolic
Maybe a bit, but unfortunately sometimes not so much. I recently had an LLM write a couple of transforms on a tree in Python. The node class just had "kind" and "children" defined, nothing else. The LLM added new attributes to use in the new node kinds (Python allows to just do "foo.bar=baz" to add one). Apparently it saw a lot of code doing that during training.
I corrected the code by hand and modified the Node class to raise an error when new attributes are added, with an emphatic source code comment to not add new attributes.
A couple of sessions later it did it again, even adding it's own comment about circumventing the restriction! X-|
Anyways, I think I mostly agree with your assessment. I might be dating myself here, but I'm not even sure what happened that made "coding" grunt work. It used to be every "coder" was an "architect" as well, and did their own legwork as needed. Maybe labor shortages changed that.
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I'm with you, it's constantly doing stupid shit and ignoring instructions, and I've always been responsible for determining architecture and doing the "legwork." Unless the task is so small and well defined that it's less typing to tell the LLM (and clean up its output) then i may as well just do it myself
> It used to be every "coder" was an "architect" as well, and did their own legwork as needed.
I disagree. I remember in the days before "software engineer" became the rage that the standard job titles had a clear delineation between the people who thought the big thoughts with titles like "analyst" and the people who did the grunt work of coding who were "programmers". You'd also see roles in between like "programmer/analyst"