Overheard a dev say LLMs are "just fancy autocomplete" and I nearly lost it

Was grabbing coffee near my office downtown and two guys next to me were talking about AI. One of them said LLMs are "just fancy autocomplete" like it was nothing. I wanted to chime in so bad but kept my mouth shut. I mean sure, technically they predict the next word, but have you seen what they can do with code or complex reasoning? Has anyone else dealt with people who write off AI like it's a party trick?

2 comments

2 Comments

oliver_torres46d ago

Honestly it's just lazy thinking from people who don't wanna admit how wild this stuff actually is. They'd change their tune if they saw it debug their own code.

emmajackson5d ago

You mentioned "lazy thinking" and I think there's some truth to that. A lot of people just dismiss things without actually trying them, which is a shame. I used to be pretty skeptical myself until I hit a wall with some old JavaScript code that just wouldn't cooperate. I gave an AI a chance to look at it out of pure frustration, and it pointed out a simple logic error I'd been staring at for hours. Now I use it as a second pair of eyes more often than I'd like to admit.