<story><title>Cheating is All You Need</title><url>https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/cheating-is-all-you-need</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>qsort</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t quite know how to put it, what follows is a rough draft of an idea, maybe someone can help me to reword it, or perhaps it&amp;#x27;s trash.&lt;p&gt;Since its inception, computer science has had two &amp;quot;camps&amp;quot;: those who believe CS is engineering, and those who believe CS is mathematics. The reason why we are seeing all of this fuss around LLMs is that they are a new front of this feud. This &amp;quot;extends&amp;quot; the usual debate on emerging technologies between Thymoetes and Laocoon.&lt;p&gt;Something that works 99 times out of 100 is 99% correct from the first perspective and 100% wrong from the second.&lt;p&gt;LLMs are therefore a step forward if you take the first view, a step back if you take the second.&lt;p&gt;If you accept this interpretation, an interesting consequence of it is that your outlook on LLMs is entirely dependent on what amounts to your aesthetic judgement.&lt;p&gt;And it&amp;#x27;s very hard not to have rather strong aesthetic judgements on what we do 40 hours a week.</text></item><item><author>Vanclief</author><text>&amp;gt; LLMs aren’t just the biggest change since social, mobile, or cloud–they’re the biggest thing since the World Wide Web. And on the coding front, they’re the biggest thing since IDEs and Stack Overflow, and may well eclipse them both.&lt;p&gt;I personally feel the technology is over-hyped. Sure, the ability of LLMs to generate &amp;quot;decent&amp;quot; code from a prompt is pretty impressive, but I don&amp;#x27;t think they are biger than Stack Overflow or IDEs.&lt;p&gt;So far my experience is that ChatGPT is great for generating code from languages I not proficient in or when I don&amp;#x27;t remember how to do something and I need a quick fix. So in a way it feels like a better &amp;quot;Google&amp;quot; but still I would rank it as inferior than Stack Overflow.&lt;p&gt;I am also hesitant about the statement that it makes us 5 times as productive because we only need to &amp;quot;check the code is good&amp;quot; for two main reasons:&lt;p&gt;1. It is my belief that if you are proficient enough in the task at hand, it is actually a distraction to be checking &amp;quot;someone else code&amp;quot; over just writing it yourself. When I wrote the code, I know it by heart and I know what it does (or is supposed to do). At least for me, having to be creating prompts and then reviewing the code that generates is slower and takes me out of the flow. It is also more exhausting than just writing the thing myself.&lt;p&gt;2. I am only able to check the correctness of the code, if am am proficient enough as a programmer (and possibly in the language as well). To become proficient I need to write a lot of code, but the more I use LLMs, the less repetitions I get in. So in a way it feels like LLMs are going to make you a &amp;quot;worse&amp;quot; programmer by doing the work for you.&lt;p&gt;Does anyone feel that way? Maybe I am wrong and the technology hasn&amp;#x27;t really clicked for me yet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Nevermark</author><text>Camp 3: Those of us who have viewed coding as a craft.&lt;p&gt;Math - the study of well defined concepts and their relationships. Solving problems with proofs.&lt;p&gt;Engineering - solving well characterized problems based on math and physics (which can include materials with known properties, chemistry, approximations, models, …), and well defined areas of composability (circuits, chemical processes, structural design, …)&lt;p&gt;Craft - solving incompletely characterized problems with math, physics, engineering and enormous amounts of experience, intuition, heuristics, wisdom, patterns, guesses, poorly understood third party modules, partial solutions pulled from random web sites …&lt;p&gt;Art - Solving subjective problems by  any means necessary.</text></comment>
<story><title>Cheating is All You Need</title><url>https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/cheating-is-all-you-need</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>qsort</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t quite know how to put it, what follows is a rough draft of an idea, maybe someone can help me to reword it, or perhaps it&amp;#x27;s trash.&lt;p&gt;Since its inception, computer science has had two &amp;quot;camps&amp;quot;: those who believe CS is engineering, and those who believe CS is mathematics. The reason why we are seeing all of this fuss around LLMs is that they are a new front of this feud. This &amp;quot;extends&amp;quot; the usual debate on emerging technologies between Thymoetes and Laocoon.&lt;p&gt;Something that works 99 times out of 100 is 99% correct from the first perspective and 100% wrong from the second.&lt;p&gt;LLMs are therefore a step forward if you take the first view, a step back if you take the second.&lt;p&gt;If you accept this interpretation, an interesting consequence of it is that your outlook on LLMs is entirely dependent on what amounts to your aesthetic judgement.&lt;p&gt;And it&amp;#x27;s very hard not to have rather strong aesthetic judgements on what we do 40 hours a week.</text></item><item><author>Vanclief</author><text>&amp;gt; LLMs aren’t just the biggest change since social, mobile, or cloud–they’re the biggest thing since the World Wide Web. And on the coding front, they’re the biggest thing since IDEs and Stack Overflow, and may well eclipse them both.&lt;p&gt;I personally feel the technology is over-hyped. Sure, the ability of LLMs to generate &amp;quot;decent&amp;quot; code from a prompt is pretty impressive, but I don&amp;#x27;t think they are biger than Stack Overflow or IDEs.&lt;p&gt;So far my experience is that ChatGPT is great for generating code from languages I not proficient in or when I don&amp;#x27;t remember how to do something and I need a quick fix. So in a way it feels like a better &amp;quot;Google&amp;quot; but still I would rank it as inferior than Stack Overflow.&lt;p&gt;I am also hesitant about the statement that it makes us 5 times as productive because we only need to &amp;quot;check the code is good&amp;quot; for two main reasons:&lt;p&gt;1. It is my belief that if you are proficient enough in the task at hand, it is actually a distraction to be checking &amp;quot;someone else code&amp;quot; over just writing it yourself. When I wrote the code, I know it by heart and I know what it does (or is supposed to do). At least for me, having to be creating prompts and then reviewing the code that generates is slower and takes me out of the flow. It is also more exhausting than just writing the thing myself.&lt;p&gt;2. I am only able to check the correctness of the code, if am am proficient enough as a programmer (and possibly in the language as well). To become proficient I need to write a lot of code, but the more I use LLMs, the less repetitions I get in. So in a way it feels like LLMs are going to make you a &amp;quot;worse&amp;quot; programmer by doing the work for you.&lt;p&gt;Does anyone feel that way? Maybe I am wrong and the technology hasn&amp;#x27;t really clicked for me yet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eightysixfour</author><text>I think this comment may miss the computer forest for the computer science trees. For a large portion of the world, computers aren’t engineering or math, computers are a tool to get something else done.&lt;p&gt;For those people, unless something fit within an existing (but large!) range of use cases, they were out of luck without having an engineer or mathematician figure it out for them. Suddenly, there is a glimmer on the horizon that all of that possibility the computer science people see every day could be unlocked for the users, and even if it only works 5% of the time, that is enough to get them excited in ways that are hard to describe to the computer science people.</text></comment>