AI can’t replace freelance coders yet, but the day is coming

Freelance coders take solace: while AI models can perform a lot of the real-world coding tasks that companies contract out, they do so less effectively than a human.

At least that was the case two months ago, when researchers with Alabama-based engineering consultancy PeopleTec set out to compare how four LLMs performed on freelance coding jobs.

David Noever, chief scientist at PeopleTec, and Forrest McKee, AI/ML data scientist at PeopleTec, describe their project in a preprint paper…