this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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To be fair, if I wrote 3000 new lines of code in one shot, it probably wouldn’t run either.
LLMs are good for simple bits of logic under around 200 lines of code, or things that are strictly boilerplate. People who are trying to force it to do things beyond that are just being silly.
Practically all LLMs aren't good for any logic. Try to play ASCII tic tac toe against it. All GPT models lost against my four year old niece and I wouldn't trust her writing production code 🤣
Once a single model (doesn't have to be a LLM) can beat Stockfish in chess, AlphaGo in Go, my niece in tic tac toe and can one-shot (on the surface, scratch-pad allowed) a Rust program that compiles and works, than we can start thinking about replacing engineers.
Just take a look at the dotnet runtime source code where Microsoft employees currently try to work with copilot, which writes PRs with errors like forgetting to add files to projects. Write code that doesn't compile, fix symptoms instead of underlying problems, etc. (just take a look yourself).
I don't say that AI (especially AGI) can't replace humans. It definitely can and will, it's just a matter of time, but state of the Art LLMs are basically just extremely good "search engines" or interactive versions of "stack overflow" but not good enough to do real "thinking tasks".
Which is such a decent use of them! I've used it on my own hardware a few times just to say "Hey give me a comparison of these things", or "How would I write a function that does this?" Or "Please explain this more simply...more simply....more simply..."
I see it as a search engine that connects nodes of concepts together, basically.
And it's great for that. And it's impressive!
But all the hype monkeys out there are trying to pedestal it like some kind of techno-super-intelligence, completely ignoring what it is good for in favor of "It'll replace all human coders" fever dreams.