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.

  • chknbwlOP
    link
    fedilink
    1322 days ago

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

    • @667
      link
      English
      12
      edit-2
      22 days ago

      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.

      • Em Adespoton
        link
        fedilink
        922 days ago

        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
          link
          fedilink
          English
          222 days ago

          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
            link
            fedilink
            322 days ago

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