this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
105 points (88.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35822 readers
2363 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

By "good" I mean code that is written professionally and concisely (and obviously works as intended). Apart from personal interest and understanding what the machine spits out, is there any legit reason anyone should learn advanced coding techniques? Specifically in an engineering perspective?

If not, learning how to write code seems a tad trivial now.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] edgemaster72@lemmy.world 67 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

understanding what the machine spits out

This is exactly why people will still need to learn to code. It might write good code, but until it can write perfect code every time, people should still know enough to check and correct the mistakes.

[–] chknbwl@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I very much agree, thank you for indulging my question.

[–] 667@lemmy.radio 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I used an LLM to write some code I knew I could write, but was a little lazy to do. Coding is not my trade, but I did learn Python during the pandemic. Had I not known to code, I would not have been able to direct the LLM to make the required corrections.

In the end, I got decent code that worked for the purpose I needed.

I still didn’t write any docstrings or comments.

[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I would not trust the current batch of LLMs to write proper docstrings and comments, as the code it is trained on does not have proper docstrings and comments.

And this means that it isn’t writing professional code.

It’s great for quickly generating useful and testable code snippets though.

[–] GBU_28@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It can absolutely write a docstring for a provided function. That and unit tests are like some of the easiest things for it, because it has the source code to work from

[–] dandi8@fedia.io 3 points 2 months ago

In my experience LLMs do absolutely terribly with writing unit tests.

[–] visor841@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

For a very long time people will also still need to understand what they are asking the machine to do. If you tell it to write code for an impossible concept, it can't make it. If you ask it to write code to do something incredibly inefficiently, it's going to give you code that is incredibly inefficient.

[–] scarabic@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I’ve even seen human engineers’ code thrown out because no one else could understand it. Back in the day, one webdev took it upon himself to whip up a mobile version of our company’s very complex website. He did it as a side project. It worked. It was complete. It looked good. It was very fast. The code was completely unreadable by anyone else. We didn’t use it.