OC below by @HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
What called my attention is that assessments of AI are becoming polarized and somewhat a matter of belief.
Some people firmly believe LLMs are helpful. But programming is a logical task and LLMs can’t think - only generate statistically plausible patterns.
The author of the article explains that this creates the same psychological hazards like astrology or tarot cards, psychological traps that have been exploited by psychics for centuries - and even very intelligent people can fall prey to these.
Finally what should cause alarm is that on top that LLMs can’t think, but people behave as if they do, there is no objective scientifically sound examination whether AI models can create any working software faster. Given that there are multi-billion dollar investments, and there was more than enough time to carry through controlled experiments, this should raise loud alarm bells.
Amen
And to add that smart people fall for dumb biases, we just need to look at the object oriented mania of the 2000s to late 2010s to see us shoehorn in one paradigm into everything without critically considering whether it made sense over other models.
Can an LLM do everything I need yet? No.
But is a stochastic parrot good enough to help me complete a function and help me restructure code? Yes definitely.
Claude is good enough for so much of the low value code I write that is actually a useful tool. I have to review the code but it’s useable.
I use AI search to lookup functions that I don’t need detailed docs for, or to help me debug arcane library specific errors (just had one earlier today where in polars the list and array types are very much not interchangeable and the explode method was failing).
I still read the docs on things that are critical, and I write the critical paths and dictate structure and understand the problem im solving well.
It’s really amazing the number of people trying to argue that LLMs are useless, while simultaneously so many people are using them successfully. Makes me wonder if they’ve even tried them.