Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I'm dialing back my LLM usage

zed.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 252 posts

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#151

Post by transpute »

sunrunner wrote: post #147
transpute wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Speedrunning an LLM variation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law . Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. — Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent? > there's a fundamental shift when a system can no longer be held in a single mind Should LLM users invest in both…

I'm compelled to make sure any comment mentioning Conway's Law has a reply linking the following video (and perhaps I should create a bot to do this): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IUj1EZwpJY This analysis of the real-world effects of Conway's Law seems deeply horrifying, because the implication seems to be that there's nothing you can do to keep communication efficiency and design quality high while also growing…

> horrifying

Self-regulating.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#152

Post by sunrunner »

transpute wrote: post #151
sunrunner wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm compelled to make sure any comment mentioning Conway's Law has a reply linking the following video (and perhaps I should create a bot to do this): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IUj1EZwpJY This analysis of the real-world effects of Conway's Law seems deeply horrifying, because the implication seems to be that there's nothing you can do to keep communication efficiency and design quality high while also growing…

> horrifying Self-regulating.

Self-regulating in a way that is designed to favour smaller independent groups with a more complete understanding and ownership of whatever that team does?

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#153

Post by i_love_retros »

Uh oh, I think the bubble is bursting.

Personally the initial excitement has worn off for me and I am enjoying writing code myself and just using kagi assistant to ask the odd question, mostly research.

When a team mate who bangs on about how we should all be using ai tried to demo it and got things in a bit of a mess, I knew we had peaked.

And all that money invested into the hype!

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#154

Post by href »

I've dialed down a lot as well. The answers I got for my queries were too often plain wrong.

I instead started asking where I might look something up - in what man page, or in which documentation. Then I go read that.

This helps me build a better mental map about where information is found (e.g., in what man page), decreasing both my reliance on search engines, and LLMs in the long run.

LLMs have their uses, but they are just a tool, and an imprecise one at that.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#155

Post by [deleted] »

x187463 wrote: post #11

Am I spending too much time on HN or is every post/comment section filled with this same narrative? Basically, LLMs are exciting but they produce messy code for which the dev feels no ownership. Managing a codebase written by an LLM is difficult because you have not cognitively loaded the entire thing into your head as you do with code written yourself. They're okay for one-off scripts or projects you do not intend t…

[deleted]

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#156

Post by lucasluitjes »

delusional wrote: post #119

I wish there was a browser addon that worked like ublock but for LLM talk. Like just take it all, every blog post, every announcement, every discussion and wipe it all away. I just want humanity to deal with some of our actual issues, like fascism, war in Europe and the middle east, the centralization of our lines of production, the unfairness in our economies. Instead we're stuck talking about if the lie machine can…

Ironically if you wanted to build that accurately and quickly, you would probably end up having an LLM classify content as being LLM-related or not. Keyword-based filtering would have many false positives, and training a model takes more time to build.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#157

Post by exceptione »

sunrunner wrote: post #147
transpute wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Speedrunning an LLM variation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law . Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. — Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent? > there's a fundamental shift when a system can no longer be held in a single mind Should LLM users invest in both…

I'm compelled to make sure any comment mentioning Conway's Law has a reply linking the following video (and perhaps I should create a bot to do this): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IUj1EZwpJY This analysis of the real-world effects of Conway's Law seems deeply horrifying, because the implication seems to be that there's nothing you can do to keep communication efficiency and design quality high while also growing…

I think you better link to a good article instead. Good grief, what a horror. A talking head rambling on for 60 minutes.

---

disclaimer: if low information density is your thing, then your mileage may vary. Video's are for documentaries, not for reading out an article in the camera.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#158

Post by apwell23 »

x187463 wrote: post #11

Am I spending too much time on HN or is every post/comment section filled with this same narrative? Basically, LLMs are exciting but they produce messy code for which the dev feels no ownership. Managing a codebase written by an LLM is difficult because you have not cognitively loaded the entire thing into your head as you do with code written yourself. They're okay for one-off scripts or projects you do not intend t…

> The other side of it is people who seem to have 'gotten it' and can dispatch multiple agents to plan/execute/merge changes across a project and want to tell you how awesome their workflow is without actually showing any code.

There have been grifters hopping onto every trend. Have you noticed they never show you what exactly they built or if it was ever useful.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#159

Post by xnx »

x187463 wrote: post #11

Am I spending too much time on HN or is every post/comment section filled with this same narrative? Basically, LLMs are exciting but they produce messy code for which the dev feels no ownership. Managing a codebase written by an LLM is difficult because you have not cognitively loaded the entire thing into your head as you do with code written yourself. They're okay for one-off scripts or projects you do not intend t…

Don't discount the number of articles that espouse a provocative position not held by the poster for the purpose of gaining traffic/attention/clout/influencer-points.

Re: I'm dialing back my LLM usage

#160

Post by apwell23 »

kraftman wrote: post #129
jimbokun wrote: post #32

I think LLMs have made a lot of developers forget the lessons in "Simple Made Easy": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4 LLMs seem to be really good at reproducing the classic Ball of Mud, that can't really be refactored or understood. There's a lot of power in creating simple components that interact with other simple components to produce complex functionality. While each component is easy to understand and…

you can tell them what to do though right? I think a lot of variance between people that say LLMs are useless and people that say they are useful is people that learn what they are good and bad at and can predict the quality of the output based on their input. Like, I might ask an LLM on its opinion on the best way to break something down, to see if it 'thinks' of anything i havent, and then ask it to implement that.…

> you can tell them what to do though right?

kind of.

Post reply on HN