https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
includes the 3rd law, which reads, and seems on topic,
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
11–20 of 377 posts
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#12Ok. Claude Code produces most code at Anthropic. Theres an enterprise code base, with acute real needs. There are real, experienced SWEs. How much babysitting and reviewing is undetermined; but the Ants seem to tremendously prefer the workflow. Even crypto people didn’t dogfood their crypto like that, on their own critical path.
Truly, how could they have the valuation they have and do anything else?
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#13Ok. Claude Code produces most code at Anthropic. Theres an enterprise code base, with acute real needs. There are real, experienced SWEs. How much babysitting and reviewing is undetermined; but the Ants seem to tremendously prefer the workflow. Even crypto people didn’t dogfood their crypto like that, on their own critical path.
> but the Ants
Is that the official cutsie name people working there are called? Those feels so 2020 ...
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#14The best way I’ve heard this described: AI (LLMs) is probably 90% of the way to human levels of reasoning. We can probably get to about 95% optimizing current technology. Whether or not we can get to 100% using LLMs is an open research problem and far from guaranteed. If we can’t, it’s unclear if it will ever really proliferate the way things hope. That 5% makes a big difference in most non-niche use cases…
>The best way I’ve heard this described: AI (LLMs) is probably 90% of the way to human levels of reasoning. We can probably get to about 95% optimizing current technology.
We don't know enough about how LLMs work or about how human reasoning works for this to be at all meaningful. These numbers quantify nothing but wishes and hype.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#15"It's crypto all over again" Crypto is a lifeline for me, as I cannot open a bank account in the country I live in, for reasons I can neither control nor fix. So I am happy if crypto is useless for you. For me and for millions like me, it is a matter of life and death. As for LLMs — once again, magic for some, reliable deterministic instrument for others (and also magic). Just classified and sorted a few hundreds of…
This is basically the only use case for crypto, and one for which it was explicitly designed: censorship resistance. This is why people have so much trouble finding useful things for it to do in the legal economy, it was explicitly designed to facilitate transactions the government doesn't want or can't facilitate. In some cases, there are humanitarian applications, there are also a lot of illicit applications.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#16[flagged]
Amen.
At my job right now there is an imminent threat from a team empowered to say "what if we asked an AI to just build X instead of having a team build and maintain it?"
X is something where it's straightforward when N is below 50 but deeply complex when N is in the thousands, which for our team it is, and there is a huge risk that this team will get a demo with N=15 that attracts leadership attention and trying to explain why the AI-generated solution does not scale is a career-limiting move framing me as a naysayer, but this AI team would deliver the demo and go away and the inevitable failure of their solution at scale would ALSO be my team's problem, so..... I hate the future.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#17Ok. Claude Code produces most code at Anthropic. Theres an enterprise code base, with acute real needs. There are real, experienced SWEs. How much babysitting and reviewing is undetermined; but the Ants seem to tremendously prefer the workflow. Even crypto people didn’t dogfood their crypto like that, on their own critical path.
In my codebase in my proprietary project, it’s possible that LLMs write around half the code, but that’s just because a lot of the trivial parts of the project are quite verbose.
The really difficult and valuable parts of the codebase are very very far beyond what the current LLMs are capable of, and believe me, I’ve tried!
Writing the majority of the code is very different from creating the majority of the value.
And I really use and value LLMs, but they are not replacing me at the moment.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#18One thing I find frustrating is that management where I work has heard of 10x productivity gains. Some of those claims even come from early adopters at my work.
But that sets expectation way too high. Partly it is due to Amdahl's law: I spend only a portion of my time coding, and far more time thinking and communicating with others that are customers of my code. Even if does make the coding 10x faster (and it doesn't most of the time) overall my productivity is 10-15% better. That is nothing to sneeze at, but it isn't 10x.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#19I'm a retired programmer. I can't imagine trusting code generated by probablities for anything mission critical. If it were close and just needed minor tweaks I could understand that. But I don't have experience with it.
My comment is mainly to say LLMs are amazing in areas that are not coding, like brainstorming, blue sky thinking, filling in research details, asking questions that make me reflect. I treat the LLM like a thinking partner. It does make mistakes, but those can be caught easily by checking other sources, or even having another LLM review the conclusions.
Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking
#20Ok. Claude Code produces most code at Anthropic. Theres an enterprise code base, with acute real needs. There are real, experienced SWEs. How much babysitting and reviewing is undetermined; but the Ants seem to tremendously prefer the workflow. Even crypto people didn’t dogfood their crypto like that, on their own critical path.
Regardless of the usefulness of llms, if you don't work at anthropic, how gullible are you to believe that claim at face value?