What that is though, is an LLM-usefulness trap. Yeah, the leetcode problem is only solved by the LLM because it's in the training data, and you can trick the LLM with some logic puzzle that's also difficult for dumb humans. But that doesn't stop it from being useful and outputting code that seems to save time.
Even if it works and saves time, it may make us pay that time back when it doesn’t work. Then we to actually think for ourselves, but we’ve been dulled. Best case, we lose time on those cases. More realistically we let bugs through. Worst case, our minds, dulled by the lack of daily training, are no longer capable of solving the problem at all, and we have to train all over again until we can… possibly until we’re fired or the project is cancelled.
Most likely though, code quality will suffer. I have a friend who observes what people commit every day, and some of them (apparently plural) copy & paste answers from an LLM and commit it before checking that it even compiles. And even when it works, it’s often so convoluted there’s no way it could pass any code review. Sure if you’re not an idiot you wouldn’t do that, but some idiots use LLMs to get through interviews (it sometimes works for remote assignments or quizzes), and spotting them on the job sometimes takes some time.
LLMs for coding are definitely useful. And harmful. How much I don’t know, though I doubt right now that the pros outweigh the cons. Good news is though, as we figure out the good uses and avoid the bad ones, it should gradually shift towards "more useful than not" over time. Or at least, "less harmful than it was".
That's one possibility. The other direction is that it takes the dull parts out of the job, so I'm no longer spending cycles on dumbass shit like formatting json properly, so that my mind can stay focused on problems bigger than if there should be a comma at the end of a line or not. Best case, our minds, freed from the drugony of tabs vs spaces, are sharpened by being able to focus on the important parts of the problem rather than than dumb parts.
> some of them (apparently plural) copy & paste answers from an LLM and commit it before checking that it even compiles.
If I were using one of these things, that's what I'd do. (Preferably rewriting the commit to read Author: AcmeBot, Committer: wizzwizz4) It's important that commit history accurately reflect the development process.
Now, pushing an untested commit? No no no. (Well, maybe, but only ever for backup purposes: never in a branch I shared with others.)
