I worked as a software engineer.
AI is supposed to replace programmers, or at least help you write code.

But I never really wrote a lot of code in the first place??
I looked up libraries that do what I need and then wrote a bit of code in-between to link our API or GUI to the right functions of the selected library.

And these libraries were tested, functional and most of all consistent and reliable.

Now what do you want me to do? Ask an non-deterministic LLM to implement the code from scratch every time I need it in my project?
That doesn’t makes sense at all.

That’s like building a car and every day you ask somebody else to make you a new wheel. And every wheel will be slightly different than the previous. So your car will drive like shit.

Instead, why not just ask a reputable wheel manufacturer to make you 4 wheels? You know they will work. And in the case of programming, people are literally giving away good, reliable wheels for free! (free libraries and APIs)

Why use LLMs at all?

  • lime!@feddit.nu
    57·
    2 days ago

    i usually write a lot of code because i have to develop novel algorithms or bespoke drivers for proprietary hardware. llms are completely unable to help with that because that’s not in the training data.

    • petrichornetrainfall@piefed.socialEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      Yeah I usually have the opposite problem op has.

      I dont write as much code as people thing engineers do, most of what I do is translating what the user says they want to what they actually want

      But the code i do write is so novel and tailor made to our implementation of standards, that AI isn’t useful at all.

      What’s weird is the few times im doing the kind of work OP is talking about, is the only time its actually useful because it can generate boilerplate code that interacts with common libraries and tools, which it has a lot of training data on.