alt Hacker NewsAt a granular level, it's almost guaranteed that you cannot write better code than an agent.
Agents now are writing extremely consistent, normalized canonical code, that usually compiles the first time.
Right out of the 'textbook'.
For what it's trying to do - it writes nearly perfect code.
The only thing you could nominally disagree with are some of the conventions and idioms.
It 'writes a perfect novel, in perfect prose'.
What it will not do however, is 'write the novel that's in your head'.
And that's the crux of it.
It's not even your job to 'write code' at this point, but rather to be the storyteller - and a very good editor who has enough taste and grasp of gammar to be able to know when it's going awry.
It will make mostly what you tell it too, the quality of the output is the quality of your guidance, but at the lowest levels it's generating extremely high quality syntactic prose.
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Syntax is the least of my concerns.
Modelling a problem is what I'm concerned about. And I'm currently better than any AI agent at doing that, given enough time.
> the quality of the output is the quality of your guidance
I wish you just started with the copout.
I don't think LLMs inherently do anything perfectly. They can make sure it compiles and passes tests and they can be trained to do an enormous array of tasks, but the code it generates isn't perfect, it's selecting one of many possible outputs based off of some numbers it came up with after a few matrix multiplications and ReLU activations.
Those matrix multiplications aren't a divine perfect thing. They suffer from floating point precision issues and training data issues and there's still debate if adversarial examples are just an unsolveable property of our linear-algebra based neural network architecture.
Can they do things way faster than a human? No doubt. Can they do very complex tasks? Yes. Do they do things with perfection? Not by our human definition of perfect.