Code Is Cheap Now. Software Isn’t.
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The barrier to entry for building software has collapsed. The barrier to building something that matters hasn’t moved an inch.
  • talkingpumpkin@lemmy.world
    112·
    2 days ago

    Being able to use an LLM turns a layman into a coder no more than being able to use CAD turns them into an engineer.

    It’s a real pity that LLMs seem to have taken over as the sole topic of discussion in programming communities such as this one. It might be just me, but I find the whole topic barely interesting at all (ie. not more interesting than the discussions about stackoverflow coding we used to have).

    • Womble@piefed.worldEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      But at the same time everyone having a CAD machine (or 3D printer) allows a lot of people to solve engineering type problems they have without an engineer, which is the article’s point.

      • talkingpumpkin@lemmy.world
        2·
        5 hours ago

        IDK.

        I just asked this to perplexity as an experiment:

        write a macos terminal command that makes a backup copy if all files in documents/ my home adding the current date and time to each filename

        Here’s what it concocted:

        cd ~ && find Documents -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec sh -c 'for f; do cp "$1" "Documents/$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)_$(basename "$1")"; done' _ {} +

        Now, I am no “prompt engineer” and surely there are better way to ask it stuff, but then again a layman is no prompt engineer either.

        So the question is: would a layman be able to provide feedback and have perplexity fix its command?

        My “layman-like” feedback (now that I re-read it, IDK how much a layman would have used “recurse”… I’m doing my best here):

        I want the files copied to a “backups” folder in my home. It should also recurse into the “documents” folder.

        mkdir -p ~/backups && cd ~/Documents && find . -type f -exec sh -c 'mkdir -p "~/backups/$(dirname "$1")" && cp "$1" "~/backups/$2/$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)_$(basename "$1")"' _ {} "$(pwd)" \;

        Feeback:

        it says “No such file or directory” (because of $PWD passed as $2 - of course I didn’t say this to the LLM)

        mkdir -p ~/backups && rsync -a --include='*/' --include='*.*' --exclude='*' --no-links ~/Documents/ ~/backups/"$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)"/

        the date must be in the file name

        mkdir -p ~/backups && find ~/Documents -type f -exec sh -c 'dir="~ /backups/$(dirname "${1#"$2"}")"; mkdir -p "$dir"; cp "$1" "$dir/$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)_$(basename "$1")"' _ {} ~/Documents \;

        I don’t think I need to continue?

        BTW: the LLM also instructed me to do a whole bunch of seemingly useless stuff, like giving Terminal.app full disk access via System Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access (which I assume is actually a thing in macos but can’t verify as I run linux)

        edit: I hope I didn’t misinterpret the bash commands (I didn’t actually run them) and spotted the right bugs in them - even if I didn’t I guess my point still stands?

    • ulterno@programming.devEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      I can use CAD. I am an engineer.
      But noone will ask me to draft a building design on AutoCAD, same as noone will ask me to do so with pencil and paper.
      Because I don’t know buildings.

      Sure, I might be asked to copy a pen-paper drawing onto CAD, but a Civil Engineer with CAD will do that better and a photo tracing software might do it as well as me.

      So while a good enough LLM might code as well as a coder, Programming is more than just coding and making anything new, requires programming.