It’s much worse than that. LLMs today don’t produce the same output for the same prompt.
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If you think that’s bad you should see how non-deterministic the alternative is (human programmers). Thankfully LLMs can iterate on the code they write, anyone who is using them to generate the same code from scratch each time a change is made needs some extra education. They are not code generators, they are junior programmers.
And junior programmers need supervision.
You’re agreeing with my point though which is that LLMs aren’t higher level compilers. LLMs aren’t abstraction, they are delegation.
Yes, lots of supervision. So humans are still useful in the loop. LLMS are definitely not algorithmic transformers (ie compilers). Well, they are more like “coders” when the term meant the secretaries who translated the mathematician and scientists (the “programmers”) notation into machine code that could run on computer, by hand.
The analogy I’ve found most helpful is that it’s like having access to a team of 100 offshore junior developers that rotate out completely every few hours.
There are certainly useful things you can do with that.
But give that team to a PM who can’t read the output and anything beyond a todo app would collapse under the chaos.
A good LLM is a junior developer who is somehow really proficient at doing unreliable research. They won’t say no, I don’t know how, like lots of junior developers, but maybe sometimes they should? They also follow instructions much better than junior developers does, and they don’t mind being micro managed.
All those things are true, but there are a few things to add to it.
They are much much better at writing plausible looking code or providing plausible sounding answers that look correct but aren’t than any junior developer. They are much better at writing subtle bugs that won’t show up for days and will take hours to debug than any junior developer is.
You can’t mentor them into being a senior developer.
Ya, but anyone who is using an LLM to write just code and isn’t also using them to write tests is nuts: they are just going to get garbage out. An LLM can totally write correct code, just not without some kind of feedback loop going on, even if that feedback loop is some form of oracle testing (where the LLM is also writing the tests, and the tests can be wrong themselves). They are also great enumerating edge cases, which feeds nicely into test coverage. 80% of your prompting work is in getting the LLM to write tests and get good coverage, maybe 20% is getting it to write code.
Junior developers (human) can kind of get by without testing, at least in the short term. The LLM can never get by without testing unless it’s some simple one off logic.