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Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

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Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

#131

Post by hyko »

cheema33 wrote: post #106
hyko wrote: post #18

The fatal problem with LLM-as-runtime-club isn’t performance. It’s ops (especially security). When the god rectangle fails, there is literally nobody on earth who can even diagnose the problem, let alone fix it. Reasoning about the system is effectively impossible. And the vulnerability of the system is almost limitless, since it’s possible to coax LLMs into approximations of anything you like: from an admin dashboar…

> The fatal problem with LLM-as-runtime-club isn’t performance. It’s ops (especially security). For me it is predictability. I am a big proponent of AI tools. But even the biggest proponents admit that LLMs are non-deterministic. When you ask a question, you are not entirely sure what kind of answers you will get. This behavior is acceptable as a developer assistance tool, when a human is in the loop to review and th…

Non-deterministic behaviour doesn’t help when trying to reason about the system. But you could in theory eliminate the non-determinism for a given input, and yet still be stuck with something unpredictable, in the sense that you can’t predict what new input will cause.

Whereas that sort of evaluation is trivial with code (even if at times program execution is non-deterministic), because its mechanics are explainable. Things like only testing boundary conditions hinge on this property, but completely fall apart if it’s all probabilistic.

Maybe explainable AI can help here, but to be honest I have no idea what the state of the art is for that.

Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

#132

Post by reissbaker »

sunaurus wrote: post #20

The question posed sounds like "why should we have deterministic behavior if we can have non-deterministic behavior instead?" Am I wrong to think that the answer is obvious? I mean, who wants web apps to behave differently every time you interact with them?

I think it's actually conceptually pretty different. LLMs today are usually constrained to:

1. Outputting text (or, sometimes, images).

2. No long term storage except, rarely, closed-source "memory" implementations that just paste stuff into context without much user or LLM control.

This is a really neat glimpse of a future where LLMs can have much richer output and storage. I don't think this is interesting because you can recreate existing apps without coding... But I think it's really interesting as a view of a future with much richer, app-like responses from LLMs, and richer interactions — e.g. rather than needing to format everything as a question, the LLM could generate links that you click on to drill into more information on a subject, which end up querying the LLM itself! And similarly it can ad-hoc manage databases for memory+storage, etc etc.

Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

#133

Post by indigodaddy »

indigodaddy wrote: post #52
hyko wrote: post #18

The fatal problem with LLM-as-runtime-club isn’t performance. It’s ops (especially security). When the god rectangle fails, there is literally nobody on earth who can even diagnose the problem, let alone fix it. Reasoning about the system is effectively impossible. And the vulnerability of the system is almost limitless, since it’s possible to coax LLMs into approximations of anything you like: from an admin dashboar…

What if they are extremely narrow and targeted LLMs running locally on the endpoint system itself (llamafile or whatever)? Would that make this concern at least a little better?

Downvoted! What a dumb comment right?

Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

#135

Post by ed »

Like a lot of people in this thread I prototyped something similar. One experiment just connected GPT to a socket and gave it some bindings to SQLite.

With a system prompt like “you’re an http server for a twitter clone called Gwitter.” you can interact directly with the LLM from a browser.

Of course it was painfully slow, quickly went off the rails, and revealed that LLM’s are bad at business logic.

But something like this might be the future. And on a longer time horizon, mentioned by OP and separately by sama, it may be possible to render interactive apps as streaming video and bypass the browser stack entirely.

So I think we’re a the Mother of All Demos stage of things. These ideas are in the water but not really practical today. Similarly to MoaD, it may take another 25 years for them to come to fruition.

Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

#136

Post by hyko »

finnborge wrote: post #62
hyko wrote: post #18

The fatal problem with LLM-as-runtime-club isn’t performance. It’s ops (especially security). When the god rectangle fails, there is literally nobody on earth who can even diagnose the problem, let alone fix it. Reasoning about the system is effectively impossible. And the vulnerability of the system is almost limitless, since it’s possible to coax LLMs into approximations of anything you like: from an admin dashboar…

At this extreme, I think we'd end up relying on backup snapshots. Faulty outcomes are not debugged. They, and the ecosystem that produced them, are just erased. The ecosystem is then returned to its previous state. Kind of like saving a game before taking on a boss. If things go haywire, just reload. Or maybe like cooking? If something went catastrophically wrong, just throw it out and start from the beginning (with…

Backup snapshots of what though? The defects aren’t being introduced through code changes, they are inherent in the model and its tooling. If you’re using general models, there’s very little you can do beyond prompt engineering (which won’t be able to fix all the bugs).

If you were using your own model you could maybe try to retrain/finetune the issues away given a new dataset and different techniques? But at that point you’re just transmuting a difficult problem into a damn near impossible one?

LLMs can be miraculous and inappropriate at the same time. They are not the terminal technology for all computation.

Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

#137

Post by oblio »

ls-a wrote: post #93
ychen306 wrote: post #74

It's orders of magnitude cheaper to serve requests with conventional methods than directly with LLM. My back-of-envelope calculation says, optimistically , it takes more than 100 GFLOPs to generate 10 tokens using a 7 billion parameter LLM. There are better ways to use electricity.

Try to convince the investors. The way the industry is headed is not necessarily related to what is most optimal. That might be the future whether we like it or not. Losing billions seems to be the trend.

Debt, just like gravity, tends to bring things crashing down, sooner or later.

Re: Show HN: Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)

#138

Post by mjevans »

113 wrote: post #57
jstummbillig wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions. You or your coworker are not a web app. You can do some of the things that web apps can, and many things that a web app can't, but neither is because of the modality. Coded determinism is hard for many problems and I find it entirely plausible that it could turn out to be the wrong approach in software, that is designed to solve som…

> Because nobody actually wants a "web app". People want food, love, sex or: solutions. Okay but when I start my car I want to drive it, not fuck it.

Food -> 'basic needs'... so yeah, Shelter, food, etc. That's why most of us drive. You are also correct to separate Philia and Eros ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love ).

A job is better if your coworkers are of a caliber that they become a secondary family.

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