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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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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.

The original tweet Jim referenced said

o3 is approximately equivalent to the #175 best human in competitive programming on CodeForces. The median IOI gold medalist has a rating of 2469; o3 has 2727.

Jim summarized this as

Apparently this AI is ranked as the 175th best coder on Earth.

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.

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.

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.