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I agree, because the arguments are not analogous. Jim didn't claim an LLM ranks 174th on a narrow metric of performance, it claimed it's the 174th best coder, so right off the bat the analogy to cars and commute cars in heavy traffic is fundamentally broken. When you said writing code was never the hard part, my response could be in roughly analogized to "if the Lamborghini was the (174th) fastest car, I should be able to make my commute no slower than in most other cars on the same gridlocked commute". If the limiting factors have nothing to do with the car itself, that means there's even more reason to expect that one of the best cars will at least be no worse than all the others.
It's not even clear that LLMs are analogous to cars here. When you call something a coder, I expect it to be able to do the job of a coder, rather than being a tool that helps improve performence. From what you're saying they'd be more like high-performance component that could improve a particular car, but won't be able to go anywhere on their own.
Which is why it might be a terrible idea to do things like call an LLM "the 174th best coder on Earth" based on it's ranking in such challenges.
The original tweet Jim referenced said
Jim summarized this as
Which is perhaps a little sloppy in terms of wording, but seems to me to be referring to coding as a task rather than a profession. I've never seen "coder" used as the word for the profession of people whose job requires them to write code, while I have seen that term used derogatorily to refer to people who can only code but struggle with the non-coding parts of the job like communicating with other people.
That said, if you're interpeting "coder" as a synonym for "software developer" and I'm interpreting it as meaning "someone who can solve leetcode puzzles", that's probably the whole disconnect right there.
Yeah, that's a good analogy. Coding ability is a component of a functional software developer, an important one, but one that is not particularly useful in isolation.
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