[furyofantares]

These metaphors all suck. Well, ok, yours is funny. But anyway, LLMs are just very different from any human.

They are extremely shallow, even compared to a junior developer. But extremely broad, even compared to the most experienced developer. They type real fuckin fast compared to anyone on earth, but they need to be told what to do much more carefully than anyone on earth.

[CuriouslyC]

I've gotten Claude Code to make CUDA kernels and all kinds of advanced stuff that there's zero percent chance a junior would pull off.

AI is like a super advanced senior wearing a blindfold. It knows almost everything, it's super fast, and it gets confused pretty quickly about things after you tell it.

[skeeter2020]

it's not a senior though, because of the amount of oversight and guidance required. I trust senior-plus human developers to do the right thing and understand why it's the right thing. For mission critical things I get another human senior to verify. There's no way I'd autonomously trust 2, 10 or any number of LLMs to do the same thing.

[achierius]

You'd be surprised at what juniors can pull off. I have seen fresh-out-of-college new grads write performant GPU kernels that are used in real world library implementations for particular architectures.

[versteegen]

Of course they can. It doesn't take that long to learn CUDA/etc and hardware details, read through some manuals and performance guides, do some small projects to solidify that knowledge. What you need is talent, and some months. That's why at university I saw plenty of students pull off amazing projects, and there's nothing eyebrow-raising in the slightest about starting a PhD a year after getting a bachelor's and writing software more sophisticated than most programmers would write in their career.

I think the programming profession overvalues experience over skill. However, when I was young I had no appreciation for what the benefits of experience are... including not writing terrible code.

[CuriouslyC]

Most of the juniors I've worked with would make numerical errors and give up/declare premature victory before getting the implementation to a robust state. I'm sure there are exceptional young folks out there though.

[godelski]

  > Most of the juniors

Most senior programmers can't write CUDA kernels either. Even fewer can write ones that are any good.

[computerex]

What's your sample size?

[andoando]

And today I asked Claude code to carefully look at and follow the structure of my tests and write some more, and after 5-10 mins it completely ignored it, wrote one class with all the helper methods and a bunch of compilation errors from fields that arent even in my model.

I figured there's probably a ton more logical issues and deleted it immediately

[QuadmasterXLII]

have you ever asked a junior developer to write a cuda kernel?

[CuriouslyC]

I've asked juniors to write easier things without success, and I applied the transitive property.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

> but they need to be told what to do much more carefully than anyone on earth.

have you ever managed an offshore team. holy cow

[PessimalDecimal]

"Offshore team." "Holy cow." I see what you did there.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

that was accidental

[Guthur]

I just spent a good 2 hours trying to debug a SM6 Vulkan issue with unreal engine using an LLM, it had got me to good state but UE kept falling to load a project, it transpired that the specific error message would provide a fix as the top Google result, which I found when I eventually decided to look for myself.

LLM did help a lot to get some busy work out of the way, but it's difficult to know when you need to jump out of the LLM loop and go old skool.

[jack_pp]

Fwiw I think the ratio of times I needed to go to google for a solution instead of an LLM is like 20:1 for me so your mileage may vary. Depends a lot on the specific niche you're working in.

Unrelated to software but recently I wanted to revive an old dumbphone I haven't used since 2014 and apparently I had it password protected and forgot the password and wanted to factory reset it. I found the exact model of the phone and google had only content farm articles that didn't help me at all but Gemini gave me the perfect solution first try. I went to google first because I had no faith in Gemini since to me it seemed like a pretty obscure question but guess I was wrong.

[Guthur]

In the interest of full disclosure my setup is quite esoteric for unreal dev. Linux and nixos no less. To be honest I'd probably have given up on nixos long ago without LLM support. It's actually really quite handy to be able to share a declarative specification of my environment.

[TexanFeller]

Google search has been enshittified. Kagi is where you get real search results now.

[platevoltage]

Unsure why this is downvoted. "Google search has been enshittified" should be a common sentiment here.

[cortesoft]

And they are incessantly cheerful.

I asked Claude to design me a UI, and it made a lovely one... but I wanted a web ui. It very happily through away all its work and made a brand new web UI.

I can't imagine any employee being that quick to just move on after something like that.

[root_axis]

I think we had the analogy right with "fancy autocomplete". Sometimes, the completions are excellent and do exactly what we want, other times the completions fail to match our expectations and need human attention. It's a tool.