alt Hacker NewsA human doing the same tasks as what the LLM did in the paper that the human will degrade the document further then the LLM. If the LLM is 25%, a human would degrade it probably 80% if they used the same technique as the LLM did in this paper. I'm talking about a single pass.
The fact of the matter is, humans don't edit things the way it was done in the paper and neither do coding agents like claude. Think about it: You do not ingest an entire paper and then regurgitate that paper with a single targeted edit... and neither do coding agents.
Also think carefully. A 25% degradation rate is unacceptable in the industry. The AI change that's taking over all of SWE development would not actually exist if there was 25% degradation... that's way too much.
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Except that coding agents will do this at times. That's half the problem. A human will forget details and exaggerate others, but LLMs fail in spectacular ways that humans rarely would, like trying to copy a document from memory rather than one word at a time, side by side, or rewriting the whole thing just to make some simple changes. Coding agents will delete tests or return True to get them to pass - something you would never expect of even a junior professional.
And I know this because I see it all the time. I use composer-2 and sonnet 4.6 on a regular basis. It's not much better for my colleagues who use Opus or GPT or any of the other frontier models. Most of the time it's fine, but other times it does things simply unforgivable for a human. I have to watch the agent closely so that it doesn't decide to nuke my database; I don't have to do that with any of my juniors, even those with little experience and poor discipline.
Are we comparing humans to LLMs or human written software to LLMs?
The whole point of creating software to do things used to be getting things done more accurately and consistently.