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How I program with LLMs

crawshaw.io

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Re: How I program with LLMs

#181

Post by aulin »

lm28469 wrote: post #174
aulin wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that related? we're talking of continuously sending proprietary code and related IP to a third party, seems a pretty valid concern to me. I, for one, work every day with plenty of proprietary vendor code under very restrictive NDAs. I don't think they would be very happy knowing I let AIs crawl our whole code base and send it to remote language models just to have fancy autocompletion.

Do you read every single line of code of every single dependency you have ? I don't see how llms are more of a threat than a random compromised npm package or something from a OS package manager. Chances are you're already relying on tons and tons of "trust me bro" and "it's opensource bro don't worry, just read the code if you feel like it"

One thing is consciously sharing IP with third parties violating contracts, another is falling victim of malicious code in the toolchain.

Npm concern though suggests we likely work in very different industries so that may explain the different perspective.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#182

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

dewitt wrote: post #52

One interesting bit of context is that the author of this post is a legit world-class software engineer already (though probably too modest to admit it). Former staff engineer at Google and co-founder / CTO of Tailscale. He doesn't need LLMs. That he says LLMs make him more productive at all as a hands-on developer, especially around first drafts on a new idea, means a lot to me personally. His post reminds me of an…

> His post reminds me of an old idea I had of a language where all you wrote was function signatures and high-level control flow

Regardless of language, that's basically how you approach the design of a new large project - top down architecture first, then split the implementation into modules, design the major data types, write function signatures. By the time you are done what is left is basically the grunt work of implementing it all, which is the part that LLMs should be decent at, especially if the functions/methods are documented to level (input/output assertions as well as functionality) where it can also write good unit tests for them.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#183

Post by aulin »

mbesto wrote: post #154
notjoemama wrote: post #7

Our company has a no AI use policy. The assumption is zero trust. We simply can’t know whether a model or its framework could or would send proprietary code outside the network. So it’s best to assume all LLMs/AI is or will send code or fragments of code. While I applaud the incredible work by their creators, I’m not sure how a responsible enterprise class company could rely on “trust us bro” EULAs or repo readmes.

> proprietary code outside the network Thought exercise: what would seriously happen if you did let some of your proprietary code outside your network? Oddly enough, 75% of the people writing code on HN probably have their companies code stored in GitHub. So there already is an inherent trust factor with GH/MSFT. As another anecdote - Twitch's source code got leaked a few years back. Did Twitch lose business because…

> Thought exercise: what would seriously happen if you did let some of your proprietary code outside your network

Lawsuits? Lawful terminations? Financial damages?

Re: How I program with LLMs

#184

Post by trash_cat »

wdutch wrote: post #27

I no longer work in tech, but I still write simple applications to make my work life easier. I frequently use what OP refers to as chat-driven programming, and I find it incredibly useful. My process starts by explaining a minimum viable product to the chat, which then generates the code for me. Sometimes, the code requires a bit of manual tweaking, but it’s usually a solid starting point. From there, I describe each…

> The biggest downside, however, is the rapid accumulation of technical debt. The code can get messy quickly. There's often a lot of redundancy and after a few iterations it can be quite daunting to modify.

What stops you from using o1 or sonnet to refactor everything? It sounds like a typical LLM task.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#185

Post by mentos »

neonsunset wrote: post #158
mentos wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m using ChatGPT4o to convert a C# project to C++. Any recommendation on what Ollama model I could use instead?

The one that does not convert C# at all and asks you to just optimize it in C# instead (and to use the appropriate build option) :D

I’m converting game logic from C# to UE5 C++. So far made great progress using ChatGPT4o and o1

Re: How I program with LLMs

#186

Post by cratermoon »

But the question must be asked: At what cost?

Are the results a paradigm shift so much better that it's worth the hundreds of billions sunk into the hardware and data centers? Is spicy autocomplete worth the equivalent of flying from New York to London while guzzling thousands of liters of water?

It might work, for some definition of useful, but what happens when the AI companies try to claw back some of that half a trillion dollars they burnt?

Re: How I program with LLMs

#187

Post by nunez »

I definitely respect David's opinion given his caliber, but pieces like this make me feel strange that I just don't have a burning desire to use them.

Like, yesterday I made some light changes to a containerized VPN proxy that I maintain. My first thought wasn't "how would Claude do this?" Same thing with an API I made a few weeks ago that scrapes a flight data website to summarize flights in JSON form.

I knew I would need to write some boilerplate and that I'd have to visit SO for some stuff, but asking Claude or o1 to write the tests or boilerplate for me wasn't something I wanted or needed to do. I guess it makes me slower, sure, but I actually enjoy the process of making the software end to end.

Then again, I do all of my programming on Vim and, technically, writing software isn't my day job (I'm in pre-sales, so, best case, I'm writing POC stuff). Perhaps I'd feel differently if I were doing this day in, day out. (Interestingly, I feel the same way about AI in this sense that I do about VSCode. I've used it; I know what's it capable of; I have no interest in it at all.)

The closest I got to "I'll use LLMs for something real" was using it in my backend app that tracks all of my expenses to parse pictures of receipts. Theoretically, this will save me 30 seconds per scan, as I won't need to add all of the transaction metadata myself. Realistically, this would (a) make my review process slower, as LLMs are not yet capable of saying "I'm not sure" and I'd have to manually check each transaction at review time, (b) make my submit API endpoint slower since it takes relatively-forever for it to analyze images (or at least it did when I experimented with this on GPT4-turbo last year), and (c) drive my costs way up (this service costs almost nothing to run, as I run it within Lambda's free tier limit).

Re: How I program with LLMs

#188

Post by dingnuts »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #182
dewitt wrote: post #52

One interesting bit of context is that the author of this post is a legit world-class software engineer already (though probably too modest to admit it). Former staff engineer at Google and co-founder / CTO of Tailscale. He doesn't need LLMs. That he says LLMs make him more productive at all as a hands-on developer, especially around first drafts on a new idea, means a lot to me personally. His post reminds me of an…

> His post reminds me of an old idea I had of a language where all you wrote was function signatures and high-level control flow Regardless of language, that's basically how you approach the design of a new large project - top down architecture first, then split the implementation into modules, design the major data types, write function signatures. By the time you are done what is left is basically the grunt work of…

> the grunt work of implementing it all

you mean the fun part. I can really empathize with digital artists. I spent twenty years honing my ability to write code and love every minute of it and you're telling me that in a few years all that's going to be left is PM syncs and OKRs and then telling the bot what to write

if I'm lucky to have a job at all

Re: How I program with LLMs

#189

Post by lm28469 »

owebmaster wrote: post #180

I thought his project, sketch.dev is of very poor quality. I wouldn't ship something like this - the auth process is awful and broke, I still can't login. If after 14 hours of the post the service is still rugged to death, it also means the scalability of the app is bad. If we are going to use LLMs to replace hours of programming, we should aim for quality too.

It's really bad, much less useful than even the first public version of chatgpt. Even once you manage to log in, most of the time it doesn't even give something that compiles, it calls functions/variables which don't exist. The first line of the main had 2 errors...

Re: How I program with LLMs

#190

Post by bityard »

billmcneale wrote: post #24
mlepath wrote: post #2

The first rule of programming with LLMs is don't use them for anything you don't know how to do. If you can look at the solution and immediately know what's wrong with it, they are a time saver otherwise... I find chat for search is really helpful (as the article states)

That's the wrong approach. I use chat for things I don't know how to do all the time. I might not know how to do it, but I sure know how to test that what I'm being told is correct. And as long as it's not, I iterate with the chat bot.

I feel like that's a good option ONLY if the code you are writing will never be deployed to an environment where security is a concern. Many security bugs in code are notoriously difficult to spot and even frequently slip through reviews from humans who are actively looking for exactly those kinds of bugs.

I suppose we could ask the question: Are LLMs better at writing secure code than humans? I'll admit I don't know the answer to that, but given what we know so far, I seriously doubt it.

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