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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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o3 is approximately equivalent to the #175 best human in competitive programming on CodeForces.

That tweet you linked does not mean what you say it means.

My brother in Christ, the 174th best coder on Earth is literally an LLM.

Competitive programming is something that fits LLM's much better than regular programming. The problems are well defined, short and the internet is filled with examples to learn from. So to say that it equals regular programming is not accurate at all.

Are LLM's decent (and getting better) at regular programming? Yes, especially combined with an experienced programmer dealing with something novel (to the programmer, but not the programming community at large), in roughly the same way (but better) that stackoverflow helps one get up to speed with a topic. In the hands of a novice programmer chaos occurs, which might not be bad if it leads to the programmer learning. But humans are lazy.

Will LLM's replace programmers? Who knows, but given my experience working with them, they struggle with anything that is not well documented on the internet very quickly. Which is sad, because I enjoy programming with them a lot.

Another thing to add is that I think the low hanging fruit is currently being picked dry. First it was increasing training for as long as it scaled (gpt4), then it was run time improvements on the model (have it re-read it's own output and sanity check it, increasing the cost of a query by a lot). I'm sure that there are more improvements on the way but like most 'AI' stuff, the early improvements are usually the easiest. So saying that programming is dead in X amount of years because "lllllook at all this progress!!!" is way too reactive.