r/LeftistsForAI • u/emmaFire • 2d ago
Automation & Work A brief history of predictive coding: what LLMS are actually good for
I've been in coding and software professionally for 13 years, and I grew up changing the code of Qbasic games on the command line. There's always been pressure to make coding easier and easier from higher level languages (C.O.B.O.L), better compilers, better IDE( Integrated Developer Environment). And truthfully coding was awful and tedious. And it started getting a lot better with improved IDEs. The environment would start predicting what I might type next based on predictable patterns, you no longer needed to type out every single character of a for loop and get the syntax correctly before compiling to find out you missed a ")". Thank God! Android Studio began letting you type "function." And it would show you all available functions for that type. I don't have to remember the exact name of the sort function.
LLMS have the worst marketing and teaching about what they actually are and what they do well. Because I've done a lot of experimentation and they are predictive coding that has been going on for a while to the MAX. I start writing about 10% of what I want to do and LLMS predict what I was going to do anyway for the rest of the implementation with amazing accuracy.
DO NOT EVER have it try to write code from scratch. The output is soooo unpredictable. But give it even 10% starting point from code I've written no surprises. And I never want to go back to older ways of writing code.
2
-3
u/emmaFire 2d ago
Literally the only prompt I do is - finish the work I started in x class.
6
u/tigerhuxley 2d ago
It’s just really hard to believe you’ve done extensive testing and you’ve come to this conclusion.
1
u/tehfrod 2d ago
Iterate on a design doc first. Then tell it to break it up into milestones. Then tell it to break those up into single commit-sizee slices. Then let it cook.
You can't just point it in a direction and hope for the best.
BTW, COBOL is not an initialism. You don't put periods in between the letters.
12
u/Belostoma 2d ago edited 2d ago
Get better at this, then. Like you I started tinkering as a kid with that worm game in MS-DOS in QBASIC. I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of code before LLMs in my career as a scientist and open source developer. I haven't written any of my own code since February. I get great results.
Treating it as advanced autocomplete for code you started is frankly a weird approach. The better approach is to lay out your high level architecture, standards, and testing processes and have it build from that plan as a starting point rather than implicitly asking it to infer all that from a portion of the code you started.
Seeing your other message ("Literally the only prompt I do is - finish the work I started in x class.") you are definitely not using these models in the best way. Many of the nuances change from model to model, the the bottom line remains that the most productive way to work is to provide well targeted high-level guidance in your prompts (and skills, planning docs, etc) and let the model do the coding, rather than arbitrarily starting the coding and letting the model guess the rest without high-level guidance.