Question for #LLM haters:

So I don’t really want to hate on LLMs or generative AI in this post, but I am curious about alternatives to LLMs for code generation. What I particularly have in mind is how LLMs are pretty good at calling up code examples and fitting them into your code base.

Has anyone tried just creating a very large database with millions of code examples or code snippets, perhaps tagged with keywords pertaining to what the code does, and letting people search code by tag and automatically paste it into your file? If StackOverflow has been mined for LLM training data, can’t we just take that StackOverflow training data and parse-out the code snippets and generate such a database?

If LLMs coding tools like #Cursor, #Claude, #Copilot, Cody, etc. are basically doing that using statistical algorithms, couldn’t we do the same thing with ordinary symbolic computation and a clever little editor plug-in with good UI/UX design for the copy-pasting?

Does anyone know if such tools/databases already exist?

I’ll tag @screwlisp and @kentpitman on this one because I am especially curious about what you think about it.

#tech #software #AskFedi #CodingAssistant #LLM #AI #GenerativeAI