Humans are also almost always operating on patterns. This is why "experience" matters a lot.
Very few people are doing truly cutting edge stuff - we call them visionaries. But most of the time, we're just merely doing what's expected
And yes, that includes this comment. This wasnt creative or an original thought at all. I'm sure hundreds of people have had similar thought, and I'm probably parroting someone else's idea here. So if I can do it, why cant LLM?
The times we just operate on patterns is when we code boilerplate or just very commonly written code. There's value in speeding this up and LLMs help here.
But generally speaking I don't experience programming like that most of the time. There are so many things going on that have nothing to do with pattern matching while coding.
I load up a working model of the running code in my head and explore what it should be doing in a more abstract/intangible way and then I translate those thoughts to code. In some cases I see the code in my inner eye, in others I have to focus quite a lot or even move around or talk.
My mind goes to different places and experiences. Sometimes it's making new connections, sometimes it's processing a bit longer to get a clearer picture, sometimes it re-shuffles priorities. A radical context switch may happen at any time and I delete a lot of code because I found a much simpler solution.
I think that's a qualitative, insurmountable difference between an LLM and an actual programmer. The programmer thinks deeply about the running program and not just the text that needs to be written.
There might be different types of "thinking" that we can put into a computer in order to automate these kinds of tasks reliably and efficiently. But just pattern matching isn't it.
Very few people are doing truly cutting edge stuff - we call them visionaries. But most of the time, we're just merely doing what's expected
And yes, that includes this comment. This wasnt creative or an original thought at all. I'm sure hundreds of people have had similar thought, and I'm probably parroting someone else's idea here. So if I can do it, why cant LLM?