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TBH I'm not sure how he arrived at "won’t replace software engineers anytime soon"

The LLM solved his task. With his "improved prompt" the code is good. The LLM in his setup was not given a chance to actually debug its code. It only took him 5 "improve this code" commands to get to the final optimized result, which means the whole thing was solved (LLM execution time) in under 1 minute.



A non-engineer would not be able to interpret ANY of what he did here, or fix any of the bugs.


A non-engineer by definition would not be able to fix bugs.

But why does it matter that they won't be able to interpret anything? Just like with real engineers you can ask AI to provide an explanation digestible by an eloi.


A patient cannot become a doctor by asking AI to explain and prescribe treatment based on symptoms. That's what Simon is trying to say.


That statement is not being discussed as it is obvious. The question is "can AI be a developer", not "am I a developer if I use an AI who is a developer".


The answer to your question is "can AI be a doctor".


This doesn't make any sense: it's a question, not the answer. I don't see the relevance of doctors to the current topic anymore. Your initial reference made sense as an analogy (although the analogy itself was irrelevant), but the new reference doesn't make any sense whatsoever.


Apart from our discussion, I guess no one is reading our comments. Therefore, we should stop sharing our thoughts and analogies.

Nice conversation with you, Victor!


By the time a non-engineer has waded through all of those necessary explanations they'll deserve to call themselves an engineer.


You did not really answer the question. The part of the comment you replied to was there to illustrate the need for the question in the first place.


Did you read the two paragraphs written above and the one where he made that statement?

My comments on "what you are not sure" is that Max is a software engineer (I am sure a good one) and he kept iterating the code until it reached close to 100x faster code because he knew what "write better code" looked like.

Now ask yourself this question: Is there any chance a no-code/low-code developer will come to a conclusion deduced by Max (he is not the only one) that you are not sure about?

An experienced software engineer/developer is capable of improving LLM written code into better code with the help of LLM.


> Max is a software engineer (I am sure a good one)

Opinions are mixed.


Then stop stirring the opinion pot, or should I say Max is a software developer and that means you.


I'd hear one where somebody thought you failed at software engineering.


I mean from this sample of 2 you could just ask it repeatedly for up to 5 times restarting the counter whenever performance improves.




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