By “good” I mean code that is written professionally and concisely (and obviously works as intended). Apart from personal interest and understanding what the machine spits out, is there any legit reason anyone should learn advanced coding techniques? Specifically in an engineering perspective?
If not, learning how to write code seems a tad trivial now.
I’m my experience they do a decent job of whipping out mindless minutea and things that are well known patterns in very popular languages.
They do not solve problems.
I think for an “AI” product to be truly useful at writing code it would need to incorporate the LLM as a mere component, with something facilitating checks through static analysis and maybe some other technologies, maybe even mulling the result through a loop over the components until they’re all satisfied before finally delivering it to the user as a proposal.
It’s a decent starting point for a new language. I had to learn webdev as an embedded C coder, and using a LLM and cross-referencing the official documentation makes a new language much more approachable.
I agree, LLMs have been helpful in pointing me in the right direction and helping me rethink what questions I actually want to ask in disciplines I’m not very familiar with.
Those kinds of patterns are already emerging! That “mulling the result through a loop” step is called “reflection,” and it does a great job of catching mistakes and hallucinations. Nothing is on the scale of doing the whole problem-solving and implementation from business requirements to deployed product-- probably never will be, IMO-- but this “making the LLM a component in a broader system with diverse tools” is definitely something that we’re currently figuring out patterns for.