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by DaiPlusPlus 547 days ago
> It's provably true that LLM's can produce working code

ChatGPT, even now in late-2024, still hallucinates standard-library types and methods more-often-than-not whenever I ask it to generate code for me. Granted, I don’t target the most popular platforms (i.e. React/Node/etc; I’m currently in a .NET shop, which is a minority platform now, but ChatGPT’s poor performance is surprising given the overall volume and quality of .NET content and documentation out there.

My perception is that “applications” work is more likely to be automated-away by LLMs/copilots because so much of it is so similar to everyone else’s, so I agree with those who say LLMs are only as good as there are examples of something online, whereas asking ChatGPT to write something for a less-trodden area, like Haskell or even a Windows driver, is frequently a complete waste of time as whatever it generates is far beyond salvaging.

Beyond hallucinations, my other problem lies in the small context window which means I can’t simply provide all the content it needs for context. Once a project grows past hundreds of KB of significant source I honestly don’t know how us humans are meant to get LLMs to work on them. Please educate me.

I’ll declare I have no first-hand experience with GitHub Copilot and other systems because of the poor experiences I had with ChatGPT. As you’re seemingly saying that this is a solved problem now, can you please provide some details on the projects where LLMs worked well for you? (Such as which model/service, project platform/language, the kinds of prompts, etc?). If not, then I’ll remain skeptical.

1 comments

> still hallucinates standard-library types and methods more-often-than-not whenever I ask it to generate code for me

Not an argument, unsolicited advice: my guess is you are asking it to do too much work at once. Make much smaller changes. Try to ask for as roughly much as you would put into one git commit (per best practices)-- for me that's usually editing a dozen or less lines of code.

> Once a project grows past hundreds of KB of significant source I honestly don’t know how us humans are meant to get LLMs to work on them. Please educate me.

https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider

Edit: The author of aider puts the percentage of the code written by LLMs for each release. It's been 70%+. But some problems are still easier to handle yourself. https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/releases

Thank you for your response - I've aksed these questions before in other contexts but never had a reply, so pretty-much any online discussion about LLMs feels like I'm surrounded by people role-playing being on LinkedIn.