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by WhyOhWhyQ 188 days ago
It's terrible at the niches I actually have expertise in, which are in mathematics. I'd guess an expert is going to find the flaws in anything it's doing in their field. That being said, if you're just trying to e.g. see what some GUI library can do then it's pretty useful to get something going. I personally would prefer not using it in anything that's not very much a throwaway test project though, but that is my luxury as a jobless bum.
1 comments

But doesn't your argument actually mean it is terrible at absolutely everything in a very subtle, convincing way, so that it takes an actual expert in the field to tell that the generated text is not a profound revelation but a bag of nonsense?

Meaning, is the answer in the field I'm not an expert of good, or am I simply being fooled by emoji and nice grammar?

I don't think it's expert, I just don't think being expert is necessary to get some value out of it if you aren't an expert. The trap is letting the charade go on longer than it should though. I personally only see the main value in using it to create test projects or to get the gist of what a library can do. I do think that's pretty valuable, and I also think real expertise is more valuable.

Or you can do like some of the others suggest and eliminate pure vibecoding. Just use it as a back and forth where you understand along the way and make well-reasoned changes. That looks a lot more like real engineering, so it's not surprising the other commenters report better results.

Gell-Mann amnesia, but for LLMs.
It's an interesting concept, but inapplicable here because I don't trust the media reporting on LLMs and I personally believe expert programmers are never going to be replaced. My concept of the value of LLMs is that they are good for generating throwaway test code to assess the use of a library or to prototype a feature.