I could either take several tedious hours to write out several thousand regex patterns by hand to automatically recognize differing formats of notation for this thing I’m doing IRL…
or I could have an LLM do it in a few seconds, and it’ll get 99.99% of the cases, missing maybe one case every hundred thousand…
or I could have an LLM do it in a few seconds, and it’ll get 99.99% of the cases, missing maybe one case every hundred thousand…
Even if the LLM does things perfectly 100% of the time, how do you expect to maintain your skills if you offload all of your work onto a chatbot? What happens when you start offloading more and more until you’re not actually doing anything except typing in prompts?
My skillset is geared towards meatsacks and things that go boom. LLMs have been a massive boon to the 1% of my job that needs a code monkey.
As long as people still talk to each other, and things need exploding, I’ll have a job. Heck, if we somehow get to a point where money isnt needed, I’d still do what I do simply 'cuz I like it.
When I wrote my numerical parser, people told me to use regexes to detect what kind of numerical value is being parsed. I just did it in one go. Only regex-like checking is for ISO datetime values.
Can’t be worse than when I was an intern, the product was literally based around parsing arbitrary HTML with regex and not even decent regex, POSIX regex from like the '80s for reasons known only unto the programming gods.
Lots of folks here create absurdly high expectations that most coders don’t meet. They are out there but they ain’t average. Getting it 80% correct with good human reviews to catch the trash and using it to figure out what’s breaking quickly vs tracking down logs has been great for our team. I laugh at some of the garbage it spits out and the dumb way you can see shit like, ‘I have to be honest I did zero testing’.
I could either take several tedious hours to write out several thousand regex patterns by hand to automatically recognize differing formats of notation for this thing I’m doing IRL…
or I could have an LLM do it in a few seconds, and it’ll get 99.99% of the cases, missing maybe one case every hundred thousand…
take your guess as to which option I chose.
LLMs are a tool. I use it as such.
Even if the LLM does things perfectly 100% of the time, how do you expect to maintain your skills if you offload all of your work onto a chatbot? What happens when you start offloading more and more until you’re not actually doing anything except typing in prompts?
My skillset is geared towards meatsacks and things that go boom. LLMs have been a massive boon to the 1% of my job that needs a code monkey.
As long as people still talk to each other, and things need exploding, I’ll have a job. Heck, if we somehow get to a point where money isnt needed, I’d still do what I do simply 'cuz I like it.
Isn’t this a case where regex may be the worse choice?
Oh my! This thing is more likely to gain sentience than any llm.
When I wrote my numerical parser, people told me to use regexes to detect what kind of numerical value is being parsed. I just did it in one go. Only regex-like checking is for ISO datetime values.
Can’t be worse than when I was an intern, the product was literally based around parsing arbitrary HTML with regex and not even decent regex, POSIX regex from like the '80s for reasons known only unto the programming gods.
sweet merciful torvalds, that must have sucked.
Glad you made it out of that hellhole.
Cheers, me too! Was educational as an intern to say the least. I think the firm went belly-up a few years later.
Lots of folks here create absurdly high expectations that most coders don’t meet. They are out there but they ain’t average. Getting it 80% correct with good human reviews to catch the trash and using it to figure out what’s breaking quickly vs tracking down logs has been great for our team. I laugh at some of the garbage it spits out and the dumb way you can see shit like, ‘I have to be honest I did zero testing’.