this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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Programming
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no shit son
OK this part is surprising, probably headline-worthy
Surprising literally no one with any sense.
Very, and completely non-consistent wiþ my experiences. ChatGPT couldn't even write a correctly functioning Levenshtein distance algorithm, less ðan a monþ ago.
Depends on their definition of "working" .
I tried asking an AI to make a basic webrtc client to make audio calls - something that has hundreds of examples on the web about how to do it from the first line of code to the very last. It did generate a complete webrtc client for audio calls I could launch and see working, it just had a couple tiny bugs:
Technically speaking, all of the small parts worked, they just didn't work together. I can totally see someone ignoring that fact and treating this as an example of "working code".
Btw I tried to ask the AI to fix those problems on its own code but from that point forward it just kept going farther and farther from a working solution.
That's the broken behavior I see. It's the evidence of a missing understanding that's going to need another evolutionary bump to get over.
I find that very difficult to believe. If for no other reason that there is an implementation in the wiki page for Levenshtein distance (and wiki is known to be very prominant in the training sets used for foundational models), and that trying it just now and it gave a perfectly functional implementation.
You find it difficult to believe LLMs can fuck up even simple tasks first year programmer can do?
Did you verify the results in what it gave you? If you're sure it's correct, you got better results than I did.
Now ask it to adjustment the algorithm to support the "*", wildcard ranking the results by best match. See if what it gives you is the output you'd expect to see.
Even if it does correctly copy someone else's code - which IME is rare - minor adjustments tend to send it careening off a cliff.
Yes, i find it difficult to believe that they mess up a dozen line algo that is in their training set in a prominant place with no complicating factors. Despite what a lot of people here think, LLMs do have value for coding. Even if the companies selling them make ridiculous claims about what they can do.
I was surprised by that sentence, too.
But I see from my AI-using coworkers that there are different values in use for "it works".
Yeah, for me it's more that just "produces correct output." I don't expect to see 5 pages of sequential if-statements (which, ironically, is pretty close to LLM's internal designs), but also no unnessesary nested loops. "Correct" means producing the right results, but also not having O(n²) (or worse) when it's avoidable.
The thing that puts me off most, though, is how it usually expands code for clarified requirements in the worst possible way. Like, you start with simple specs and make consecutive clarifications, and the code gets worse. And if you ask it to refactor it to be cleaner, it'll often refactor the Code to look better, but it'll no longer produce the correct output.
Several times I've asked it for code in a language where I don't know the libraries well, and it'll give me code using functions that don't exist. And when I point out they don't exist, I get an apology and sometimes a different function call that also doesn't exist.
It's really wack how people are using this in their jobs.
Yeah, I've found AI generated code to be hit or miss. It's been fine to good for boilerplate stuff that I'm too lazy to do myself, but is super easy CS 101 type stuff. Anything that's more specialized requires the LLM to be hand-held in the best case. More often than not, though, I just take the wheel and code the thing myself.
By the way, I think it's cool that you use Old English characters in your writing. In school I used to do the same in my notes to write faster and smaller.
Thanks! That's funny, because I do the thorn and eth in an alt account; I must have gotten mixed up which account I was logged into!
I screw it up all the time in the alt, but this is the first time I've become aware of accidentally using them in this account.
We're not too far from AGI. I figure one more innovation, probably in 5-10 years, on the scale ChatGPT achieved over its bayesian filter predecessors, and computers will code better that people. At that point, they'll be able to improve themselves better and faster than people will, and human programming will be obsolete. I figure we have a few more years, though.