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Would you recognize a memory corruption bug when the LLM cheerfully reports that everything is perfect?

Would you understand why some code is less performant than it could be if you've never written and learned any C yourself? How would you know if the LLM output is gibberish/wrong?

They're not wrong; it's just not black-and-white. LLMs happen to sometimes generate what you want. Often times, for experienced programmers who can recognize good C code, the LLMs generate too much garbage for the tokens it costs.

I think some people are also arguing that some programmers ought to still be trained in and experienced with the fundamentals of computing. We shouldn't be abandoning that skill set completely. Some one will still need to know how the technology works.



Not sure how your comments relates to mine.

The parent I answered said you shouldn't use LLMs for things you don't understand while I advocate you should use them to help you learn.

You seem to describe very different use cases.

In any case, just to answer your (unrelated to mine) comment, here[1] you can see a video of one of the most skilled C developers on the planet finding very hard to spot bugs in the Redis codebase.

If all your arguments boil down to "lazy people are lazy and misuse LLMs" that's not a criticism of LLMs but of their lack of professionalism.

Humans are responsible for AI slop, not AI. Skilled developers are enhanced by such a great tool that they know how and when to use.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCIZflYEpEk


I was commenting on relying completely on the LLM when learning a language like C when you don’t have any prior understanding of C.

How do people using LLMs this way know that the generated code/text doesn’t contain errors or misrepresentations? How do they find out?


>The parent I answered said you shouldn't use LLMs for things you don't understand while I advocate you should use them to help you learn.

Someone else interpretation is not the author's saying. :)

Since the tone is so aggressive, it doesn't feel like it would be easy to build any constructive discussion on this ground.

Acting prudently is not blind rejection, the latter being not wiser than blind acceptance.




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