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Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

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Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#271

Post by khazhoux »

troupo wrote: post #266
khazhoux wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I read your article. It's the latest in the stream of "everyone is full of crap" about LLMs. You say you've used it to build multiple projects, but then title it "everything is wishful thinking". That makes no sense. You're either click-baiting or have an inconsistent stance. > This is crypto all over again No. The fundamental vision for BTC is that it grows to be a mainstream currency for a huge variety of use…

> That makes no sense. You're either click-baiting or have an inconsistent stance. Or you haven't actually understood a single thing from the article. Like the fact you say "aren't we technologists" immediately followed by a completely unverifiable claim that everyone is supposed to take at face value, uncritically. And any criticism is immediately labeled as "crap", "people who can't see the future" etc. Remind you…

You had a fine criticism in the article: that people's claims of success or failure should be accompanied by contextual information, to prevent bad extrapolations. But then you title it "Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking." Was this tongue in cheek? Hyperbole for effect? Because it seems you're saying that when the data comes out, people will realize this was all a fraud.

There's a big difference between stating "everything" here is wishful thinking, versus calling for more data to understand the strengths and weaknesses.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#272

Post by hackable_sand »

khazhoux wrote: post #261
troupo wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm honestly started to get pissed seeing these articles on HN every day. Aren't we technologists? Funnily enough, that's exactly what the article asks. > I'm an expert in my field with decades of experience, and a damn good programmer, and Cursor is like zipping down the street on a powered bike. Oh look, an unverified claim. Go through the first list in the article, and ask "what we, as technologists, know about…

Yeah, I read your article. It's the latest in the stream of "everyone is full of crap" about LLMs. You say you've used it to build multiple projects, but then title it "everything is wishful thinking". That makes no sense. You're either click-baiting or have an inconsistent stance. > This is crypto all over again No. The fundamental vision for BTC is that it grows to be a mainstream currency for a huge variety of use…

I've used it to build multiple projects and yeah my consensus is that LLM-bros are in denial about this new wave of AI tech.

We're not there yet. Try again in 20.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#273

Post by ghuntley »

ofjcihen wrote: post #210
ghuntley wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canva has seen a 30% productivity uplift - https://fortune.com/2025/06/25/canva-cto-encourages-all-5000... AI is the new uplift. Embrace and adapt, as a rift is forming (see my talk at https://ghuntley.com/six-month-recap/ ), in what employers seek in terms of skills from employees. I'm happy to answer any questions folks may have. Currently AFK [2] vibecoding a brand new programming language [1]. [1] https://x.com/G…

There’s something hilariously Portlandia about making outlandish claims with complete confidence and then plugging your own talk.

There’s citations to the facts in the links.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#274

Post by solumunus »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #130
tasty_freeze wrote: post #18

One 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…

Maybe it's due to a more R&D-ish nature of my current work, but for me, LLMs are delivering just as much gains in the "thinking" part as in "coding" part (I handle the "communicating" thing myself just fine for now). Using LLMs for "thinking" tasks feels similar to how mastering web search 2+ decades ago felt. Search engines enabled access to information provided you know what you're looking for; now LLMs boost that…

I’m surprised it’s only 1/3rd. 90% of my searches for information start at Perplexity or Claude at this point.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#275

Post by seba_dos1 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #130
tasty_freeze wrote: post #18

One 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…

Maybe it's due to a more R&D-ish nature of my current work, but for me, LLMs are delivering just as much gains in the "thinking" part as in "coding" part (I handle the "communicating" thing myself just fine for now). Using LLMs for "thinking" tasks feels similar to how mastering web search 2+ decades ago felt. Search engines enabled access to information provided you know what you're looking for; now LLMs boost that…

From time to time I use an LLM to pretend to research a topic that I had researched recently, to check how much time it would have saved me.

So far, most of the time, my impression was "I would have been so badly mislead and wouldn't even know it until too late". It would have saved me some negative time.

The only thing LLMs can consistently help me with so far is typing out mindless boilerplate, and yet it still sometimes requires manual fixing (but I do admit that it still does save effort). Anything else is hit or miss. The kind of stuff it does help researching with is usually the stuff that's easy to research without it anyway. It can sometimes shine with a gold nugget among all the mud it produces, but it's rare. The best thing is being able to describe something and ask what it's called, so you can then search for it in traditional ways.

That said, search engines have gotten significantly worse for research in the last decade or so, so the bar is lower for LLMs to be useful.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#276

Post by diggan »

0x696C6961 wrote: post #166
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree strongly at this point. The code is generally good if the prompt was reasonable at this point but also every test possible is now being written, every ui element has the all required traits, every function has the correct documentation attached, the million little refactors to improve the codebase are being done, etc. Someone told me ‘ai makes all the little things trivial to do’ and i agree strongly with…

> The code is generally good if the prompt was reasonable The point is writing that prompt takes longer than writing the code. > Someone told me ‘ai makes all the little things trivial to do’ and i agree strongly with that Yeah, it's great for doing all of those little things. It's bad at doing the big things.

> The point is writing that prompt takes longer than writing the code.

Luckily we can reuse system prompts :) Mine usually contains something like https://gist.github.com/victorb/1fe62fe7b80a64fc5b446f82d313... + project-specific instructions, which is reused across sessions.

Currently, it does not take the same amount of time to prompt as if I was to write the code.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#277

Post by herbst »

swader999 wrote: post #183
bamboozled wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Claude code for hours a day, it’s a liar, trust what it does at your own risk. I personally think you’re sugar coating the experience.

It lies with such enthusiasm though.

Recently worked with a weird C flavor (Monkey C) it hallucinated every single method, all the time, every time again.

I know it's just a question of time, likely. However that was soooo far from helpful. And it was itself so sure it's doing it right, again and again without ever consulting the docs

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#278

Post by solumunus »

abletonlive wrote: post #125
tasty_freeze wrote: post #18

One 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…

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…

You seem completely insufferable and incredibly cringeworthy.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#279

Post by herbst »

kgeist wrote: post #141

We recently started using LLMs at our company, and the first job I had was to transcribe 20k customer calls and extract the following info: 1) what products we're usually compared to 2) what problems users have with our software 3) what use cases users mention most often What used to take weeks of research took just a couple of hours. It helped us form a new strategy and brought real business value. I see LLMs as jus…

This very much. People who claim there is no real use of LLM never faced the problem of processing a lot of data in kinda reliably way.

For years most of the translations on the web didn't have context. Now they can have.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#280

Post by lottin »

martinald wrote: post #33

I personally don't really get this. _So much_ work in the 'services' industries globally comes down to really a human transposing data from one Excel sheet to another (or from a CRM/emails to Excel), manually. Every (or nearly every) enterprise scale company will have hundreds if not thousands of FTEs doing this kind of work day in day out - often with a lot of it outsourced. I would guess that for every 1 software e…

You're vastly underestimating the complexity of these types of jobs.
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