> 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.
I personally feel the technology is over-hyped. Sure, the ability of LLMs to generate "decent" code from a prompt is pretty impressive, but I don't think they are biger than Stack Overflow or IDEs.
So far my experience is that ChatGPT is great for generating code from languages I not proficient in or when I don't remember how to do something and I need a quick fix. So in a way it feels like a better "Google" but still I would rank it as inferior than Stack Overflow.
I am also hesitant about the statement that it makes us 5 times as productive because we only need to "check the code is good" for two main reasons:
1. It is my belief that if you are proficient enough in the task at hand, it is actually a distraction to be checking "someone else code" 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.
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 "worse" programmer by doing the work for you.
Does anyone feel that way? Maybe I am wrong and the technology hasn't really clicked for me yet.
I personally feel the technology is over-hyped. Sure, the ability of LLMs to generate "decent" code from a prompt is pretty impressive, but I don't think they are biger than Stack Overflow or IDEs.
So far my experience is that ChatGPT is great for generating code from languages I not proficient in or when I don't remember how to do something and I need a quick fix. So in a way it feels like a better "Google" but still I would rank it as inferior than Stack Overflow.
I am also hesitant about the statement that it makes us 5 times as productive because we only need to "check the code is good" for two main reasons:
1. It is my belief that if you are proficient enough in the task at hand, it is actually a distraction to be checking "someone else code" 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.
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 "worse" programmer by doing the work for you.
Does anyone feel that way? Maybe I am wrong and the technology hasn't really clicked for me yet.