I’d argue it’s more than 10% checking. You really do have to be engaged in the process, and you can’t farm out thinking to the LLM. It’s a great tool for generating code, but you have to be making conscious decisions at the developer. My process has been to come up with a step by step plan, where there are clear and focused deliverables at each stage, and then do commits for each one and review the diff. This way I have a clear context of what the task is doing, and a reasonable amount of code I can read through to do a proper code review. And it’s easy to actually test the functionality out to see that it’s working. If you take this approach, then the tool really can save you a lot of time.
LLMs are okay at writing code, but not good at software architecture
This is very much the case. I have a local LLM that does a fairly good job of writing code for quick and easy apps that I might need - for instance, last week I wanted to create a simple floor plan of my house and couldn’t find exactly what I wanted online, so I had my machine create a web based app to do it. But, when I tried to use it to create a fairly large and complex text based adventure game when it reached a certain size my LLM just couldn’t handle it any longer. That project stalled for a bit until a couple of weeks ago when Fable 5 was released… as a test I pointed Fable at that code base and in about 45 minutes it had completed the entire game engine.
I really don’t like the idea of corporate owned LLMs, but I am very impressed with Fable and can’t wait until the Local LLM community is able to replicate its functionality.
Yup, and as you mentioned in another comment, this tech is being marketed as something that it’s not because companies pushing it want to convince other companies that it will replace human labor.
I’d argue it’s more than 10% checking. You really do have to be engaged in the process, and you can’t farm out thinking to the LLM. It’s a great tool for generating code, but you have to be making conscious decisions at the developer. My process has been to come up with a step by step plan, where there are clear and focused deliverables at each stage, and then do commits for each one and review the diff. This way I have a clear context of what the task is doing, and a reasonable amount of code I can read through to do a proper code review. And it’s easy to actually test the functionality out to see that it’s working. If you take this approach, then the tool really can save you a lot of time.
Yeah, my impression is that LLMs are okay at writing code, but not good at software architecture.
It’s an advanced autocomplete, not something that can think, at least not on the level that humans do.
This is very much the case. I have a local LLM that does a fairly good job of writing code for quick and easy apps that I might need - for instance, last week I wanted to create a simple floor plan of my house and couldn’t find exactly what I wanted online, so I had my machine create a web based app to do it. But, when I tried to use it to create a fairly large and complex text based adventure game when it reached a certain size my LLM just couldn’t handle it any longer. That project stalled for a bit until a couple of weeks ago when Fable 5 was released… as a test I pointed Fable at that code base and in about 45 minutes it had completed the entire game engine.
I really don’t like the idea of corporate owned LLMs, but I am very impressed with Fable and can’t wait until the Local LLM community is able to replicate its functionality.
Yup, and as you mentioned in another comment, this tech is being marketed as something that it’s not because companies pushing it want to convince other companies that it will replace human labor.