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   Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)'s status on Monday, 28-Oct-2024 08:39:48 JST Ludovic Courtès

   in reply to

   • Stefano Zacchiroli

   @zacchiro To me, “programming by example” as shown by Will Byrd could be interesting: it can only produce code that works for the examples you give.
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyfBQmvr2Hc&t=78m

   Assistance as in “hey, this code snippet may or may not do what you want” doesn’t have the same appeal.

   But again, I think this is a secondary issue compared to the environmental issue. If free software is a humanist project, my view is we cannot just dismiss that for the sake of addressing our FOMO.

   @khinsen

   • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Stefano Zacchiroli (zacchiro@mastodon.xyz)'s status on Monday, 28-Oct-2024 08:39:50 JST Stefano Zacchiroli

     @khinsen @civodul also, while "statistically plausible code" is an amazing negative term for what code LLMs do (chapeau to whoever coined it 😉), it hides the fact that code bases are full of *recurrent patterns*. Some of them should be refactored away (but aren't!, for whatever reason). Others are there to stay and part of the (broader) coding style of a project. One thing code LLMs are really good at is spotting, replicating, and instantiating those patterns (for better or worse).