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Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

dmitriid.com

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Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#171

Post by abletonlive »

swader999 wrote: post #162
abletonlive wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a tech lead and I have maybe 5X output now compared to everybody else under me. Quantified by scoring tickets at a team level. I also have more responsibilities outside of IC work compared to the people under me. At this point I’m asking my manager to fire people that still think llms are just toys because I’m tired of working with people with this poor mindset. A pragmatic engineer continually reevaluates what t…

"I’ve offered to share my workflows, prompts" That should all be checked in.

It’s checked in, they have just written off llms

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#172

Post by abletonlive »

flextheruler wrote: post #139
abletonlive wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

im glad I don’t have to work with you too lol. It’s not toxic for me to expect someone to get their work done in a reasonable amount of time with the tools available to them. If you’re an accountant and you take 5X the time to do something because you have beef with excel you’re the problem. It’s not toxicity to tell you that you are a bad accountant

You believe the cost of firing and rehiring to be cheaper than simple empirical persuasion? You don't sound like a great lead to me, but I suppose you could be working with absolutely incompetent individuals, or perhaps your soft skills need work. My apologies but I see only two possibilities for others not to take the time to follow your example given such strong evidence. They either actively dislike you or are tot…

You have about 50% of HN thinking LLMs are useless and you’re commenting on an article about how it’s still magical and wishful thinking, and that this is crypto all over again. But sure, the problem is me, not the people with a poor model of reality

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#173

Post by doug_durham »

98eb1d0ff7fb96 wrote: post #90
garciasn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well; I can't speak to your specific experience (current or past) but I'm telling you that while I'm skeptical as hell about EVERYTHING, it's blowing my expectations away in every conceivable way. I built something in less than 24h that I'm sure would have taken us MONTHS to just get off the ground, let alone to the polished version it's at right now. The most impressive thing is that it can do all of the things that…

See, your comment is a good example of what's going wrong. The OP specifically mentioned "mission critical things" - My interpretation of that would be things that are not allowed to break, because otherwise people might die, in the worst case - and you were talking about just SOMETHING that got "done" faster. No mention about anything critical. Of course, I was playing around with claude code, too, and I was fascina…

I don't understand. Of course you should read the code. There is no responsible engineer that would advocate for blindly accepting code written by another party for critical functions, be that a human or an LLM.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#174

Post by selfhoster11 »

sureglymop wrote: post #43

Loosely related, but I find the use of AGI (and sometimes even AI) as terms annoying lately. Especially in scientific papers, where I would imagine everything to be well defined. If at least in how it is used in that paper. So, why can't we just come up with some definition for what AGI is? We could then, say, logically prove that some AI fits that definition. Even if this doesn't seem practically useful, it's theore…

You don't need consensus on the meaning across the board. I maintain my own, more permissive milestone for what constitutes "AGI", but I have no expectations that others will share it. Much like "crypto" to me is still cryptography, not cryptocurrency - sometimes the mainstream will just have a different opinion.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#175

Post by selfhoster11 »

ibaikov wrote: post #147
CharlesW wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes no sense to compare the current AI hype to the tulip mania of crypto/NFTs. A much better parallel is to cloud computing hype in 2009.

I think it does. Startups, VCs and media still provoke hype trains. People cherry pick and extrapolate everything in AI as well.

Except the benefits of LLM adoption can be measured empirically, with your own eyes. And don't require network effects to fully realise benefits, unlike cryptocurrency and NFTs. Ignoring the hype and doing your own thing with it is a good choice.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#176

Post by selfhoster11 »

leptons wrote: post #163
arendtio wrote: post #60

I think it is more like googling: when the search engine appeared, everybody had to learn how to write a good query, even though the expectation was that everybody could use them. With LLMs, it's quite similar: you have to learn how to use them. Yes, they are non-deterministic, but if you know how to use them, you can increase your chances of getting a good result dramatically. Often, this not only means articulating…

>Yes, they are non-deterministic The LLM is more like a Ouija board than a reliable tool. >I can ask it to write user stories or prototypes By the time I write enough to explain thoroughly to an LLM what to write in "user stories" or "prototypes", I could have just written it myself, without the middleman(bot), and without the LLM hallucinating. If half the time I spend with an LLM is telling it what to do, and then…

Writing the prompt takes time, but in many cases it's like rubber-duck debugging - it helps you to figure out the actual requirements, flow, or even incorrect/missing assumptions. Is it worth the time? Subjective.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#179

Post by tiahura »

KerrAvon wrote: post #142
tiahura wrote: post #36

Everything? As a lawyer, I’m producing 2x - with fewer errors. Admittedly, law is a field that mostly involves shuffling words around so it may be the best case scenario, but much of the skepticism comes off as cope.

uh https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116823/how-ai-i... https://hai.stanford.edu/news/hallucinating-law-legal-mistak... https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/a... There are more of these stories every week. Are you using AI in a way that doesn’t allow you to be entrapped by this sort of thing?

ChatGPT links to the actual text in a case now. Also, take the output from Claude, and put it into Gemini and tell it to verify holdings. Furthermore, spot checking 10 cases doesn’t take long.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#180

Post by geetee »

I'm working with product managers that are almost certainly using LLMs to generate product requirement docs, complete with code samples, data type definitions, and diagrams. Everything looks good to the untrained eye, but it's complete and utter bullshit. LLM abuse is going to be the end of so many tech companies.
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