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  • brynden_rivers_esq@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    I’m not a coder, so I can’t speak to the quality of code generated by these models. I am a lawyer, and every time I see stuff that lay people think is impressive in my field, I can’t help but guffaw and think “none of this is going to function, and no one will know for years. We’re so fucked…and then one day we’ll have to clean all this up and it’s gonna be so much work.” I kind of assume it’ll be similar for code? Like…it’ll obviously be somewhat better because there is a lot of testing you can actually do, whereas in law “testing” takes many years…and by the time you find out something doesn’t work, the burden of having done it wrong all this time, thinking it was right is catastrophic (which is why lawyers are so conservative about language that they “know works.”

    I can see how little features can get added and these tools can deliver on those projects fast…but like…can they do bigger things with consistency? Can they like…set things up well? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but…I guess i’m thinking about Go. It took a long time for neural networks to get to be good at 19 x 19. They got good at 9 x 9 pretty fast. But as the game gets more complicated, it’s way WAY harder to do good long-term strategy. And the machines got there, no doubt. But the entire universe of Go is a 19x19 grid, on which the spaces are black or white or empty. How much more complicated is a language? Even a programming language? infinitely more complex, of course!

    So I worry that we’re going to have individual features that work well, but systems that cannot function…looking like the uhhh…weasley house in Harry Potter…but without the magic to hold it up lol.

    • favoredponcho@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      I think the difference is that the LLMs can read all the context of your project and figure out what will work. If you want to add a feature, it will do so in a way that won’t break other things or offer you options if you can’t make that change without breaking something.

      Also, LLMs are super fast compared to humans so even when it’s slightly wrong, it can be fixed with another prompt. People act like the LLM doing something wrong makes using LLMs pointless, but they are ignoring the fact that the LLM can always take another prompt and keep working until it gets it right, which is usually immediately once the issue is recognized.

      You can even automate the feedback loop by describing the test scenarios and then having it run those tests, see the failures, and fix the code all by itself.

      I get LLMs might not work as well for law at this point, but they do work for coding.

      • brynden_rivers_esq@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        6 days ago

        I’ll have to take your word for it! “figuring out” sounds like a higher-order process than a large language model is capable of to me, but if what they do is as good, then great.

        I think I’m just skeptical because of how horrendously bad LLM output is in my field of expertise (despite looking fine to a lay person), so I immediately analogize that to other areas. The output of law and coding are both really about language, and the process of creating that output on the part of a lawyer or coder are really about language, so I can see how one might think LLMs would be able to recreate what lawyers and coders do. But boy it doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible that LLMs will ever get there, at least for law. I have no doubt some yet-unimagined technology could get us there, but “next word prediction” just isn’t gonna be it.

        • favoredponcho@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
          0·
          6 days ago

          You don’t have to take my word for it. You can get a subscription to Claude for $20 and install the CLI tool. Ask it to start building something basic. Give it something small first and then expand what your asking for in the next request.

          https://code.claude.com/docs/en/setup

          Claude can also help explain how to set it up if your unfamiliar with things like the terminal or git.

          • brynden_rivers_esq@lemmy.caEnglish
            0·
            6 days ago

            I have to take your word for it because I don’t know what good code looks like lol. Again, to compare to what I’m familiar with, you can also ask an LLM to draft you a purchase agreement for shares of a private company, and if you’re not a lawyer it’ll look good…and it’ll be able to sound like it’s explaining to you why it’s good…but it will not be good haha

            • favoredponcho@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
              0·
              6 days ago

              You use software though? You don’t need to even look at the code, lol. I’m downloading open source projects and modifying their functionality for my personal use with Claude and I don’t even know how they work. Don’t even open the code in an editor, I don’t need to know what it looks like.

              • brynden_rivers_esq@lemmy.caEnglish
                1·
                5 days ago

                Ah, well in that case I won’t take your word for it that it’s good. I’ll take your word for it that it’s working for you for now… Again in a legal context, that’s like “I got chat GPT to write this contract, and it’s working great,” but of course…it won’t be when things go wrong haha!