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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

#311

Post by rickvidallon »

In a brief nutshell, I'm personally not in favor of how AI is taking over the industry (all of industry, that is). First of all, LLMs aren't even really what I would call AI, but that's a digression. I think, mainly, people are using it for the wrong reasons. I've seen graphics designers at work use it to generate images—and I don't just mean Adobe Firefly generative fill, but all-out "create me this logo." That's just lazy, given their job titles, and has started making everything look samey. Worse than how Bootstrap, Tailwind, etc., has the tendency to make everything samey.

For someone like me, who is self-taught on essentially all of his career skills, I have particular concern for a world in which people use AI to "learn things," when that tech doesn't allow them to make mistakes. It just does things for people. For that reason alone, I don't see AI as a viable way to learn at all. If your parents never take their hand from the back of the bicycle seat, do you really know how to ride a bike without falling over? Isn't the scraped knee how we truly mastered that skill?

For SEO in particular, I'd probably defer to someone with more daily experience, like you. That said, I think I can extrapolate from what I've seen elsewhere that the sameyness may likely start to affect content itself (in fact, it already has, for so many formerly good news outlets). Google search kinda blows in recent years. The AI Overview feature means so many people aren't visiting the source website anyway.

To me, none of this looks appetizing. It looks like a snake eating its own tail.

I don't mean to sound so bummer about the topic, but I've begun to worry about my own place in this ecosystem for the next 15, 20 years until I retire. Most of the joy in development has been sucked out of the art. Today, it seems mostly about getting wrapped around the axle of countless frameworks (without even really understanding them) and manhandling those chocolates on Lucy's and Ethel's conveyor belt. It's a comedy of errors. I'll yell "Get off my lawn" with the best of them. Add the same issues to SEO, and I don't really know where we'll end up, but it doesn't look creative, to me. It looks like a sad cliché, like the rows upon rows of sad souvenir shops that all kind of sell the same thing—the tourist trap that travelers (at least, travelers like me) actually loathe and try to avoid.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#312

Post by famouswaffles »

DavidPiper wrote: post #288
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #51

This reads like the author is mad about imprecision in the discourse which is real but to be quite frank more rampant amongst detractors than promoters, who often have to deal with the flaws and limitations on a day to day basis. The conclusion that everything around LLMs is magical thinking seems to be fairly hubristic to me given that in the last 5 years a set of previously borderline intractable problems have beco…

Translation, transcription, and code generation (up to some scale) were borderline intractable problems? Google Translate, Whisper and Code Generators (up to some scale) have existed for quite some time without using LLMs.

Google Translate just spits out nonsense for distant language pairs (EnglishKorean etc) and doesn't compare to Sota LLMs, Whisper is a Transformer (Architecture used for LLMs) and Code Generators have nothing on LLMs.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#313

Post by timr »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #295
timr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider the reasoning models to be primarily a development of efficiency/cost, and I thought the first one was about a year ago, but sure, ok. I don’t think it changes the argument I’m making. The LLM ourobouros / robot centipede has been done, and is not itself a path towards exponential improvement. To be quite honest, I’ve found very little marginal value in using reasoning models for coding. Tool usage, sure,…

> but you can’t trust them to do a calculation in the middle of a task. You can't trust a person either. Calculating is its own mode of thinking; if you don't pause and context switch, you're going to get it wrong. Same is the case with LLMs. Tool usage and reasoning and "agentic approach" are all in part ways for allowing LLM to do the context switch required, instead of taking the match challenge as it goes and blo…

The proper comparison is not a human, it’s a computer. Or even a human with a computer.

But my point wasn’t to judge LLMs on their (in)ability to do math - I was only responding to the parent comment’s assertion that they’ve gotten better in this area.

It’s worth noting that all of the major models still randomly decide to ignore schemas and tool calls, so even that is not a guarantee.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#314

Post by ben_w »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #309
saulpw wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each FTE doing that manual data pipelining work is also validating that work, and they have a quasi-legal responsibility to do their job correctly and on time. They may have substantial emotional investment in the company, whether survival instinct to not be fired, or ambition to overperform, or ethics and sense to report a rogue manager through alternate channels. An LLM won't call other nodes in the organization to…

> An LLM won't call other nodes in the organization to check when it sees that the value is unreasonable for some out-of-context reason, like yesterday was a one-time-only bank holiday and so the value should be 0. Why not? LLMs are the first kind of technology that can take this kind of global view. We're not making much use of it in this way just yet, but considering "out-of-context reasons" and taking a wider pers…

> I do agree on the liability angle. This increasingly seems to be the main value a human brings to the table. It's not a new trend, though. See e.g. medicine, architecture, civil engineering - licensed professionals aren't doing the bulk of the work, but they're in the loop and well-compensated for verifying and signing off on the work done by less-paid technicians.

Ironic that this liability issue is one of the big ways that "software engineer" isn't like any other kind of engineer.

My university was saying as much 20 years ago, well before GenAI.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#315

Post by lubujackson »

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.

Have to disagree with this too - ask an LLM to architect a project, or propose a cleaner solution and usually does a good job.

Where it still sucks is doing both at once. Thus the shift to integrating "to do" lists in Cursor. My flow has shifted to "design this feature" then "continue to implement" 10 times in a row with code review between each step.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#316

Post by lubujackson »

alt187 wrote: post #99
hotpotat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did read the entire article before commenting and acknowledge that you are using them to some affect, but the line about 50% of the time it works 50% of the time is where I lost faith in the claims you’re making. I agree it’s very context dependent but, in the same way, you did not outline your approaches and practices in how you use AI in your workflow. The same lack of context exists on the other side of the argu…

I agree about the 50/50 thing. It's about how much Claude helped me, and I use it daily too . I'll give some context, though. - I use OCaml and Python/SQL, on two different projects. - Both are single-person. - The first project is a real-time messaging system, the second one is logging a bunch of events in an SQL database. In the first project, Claude has been... underwhelming. It casually uses C idioms, overabuses…

Just FYI, try commenting on that function what it is intended to be used for. Because without more info LLMs will rely on function names strongly. Heck, have the LLM add comments to every function and I bet it will start to do better.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#317

Post by TeMPOraL »

ben_w wrote: post #314
TeMPOraL wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An LLM won't call other nodes in the organization to check when it sees that the value is unreasonable for some out-of-context reason, like yesterday was a one-time-only bank holiday and so the value should be 0. Why not? LLMs are the first kind of technology that can take this kind of global view. We're not making much use of it in this way just yet, but considering "out-of-context reasons" and taking a wider pers…

> I do agree on the liability angle. This increasingly seems to be the main value a human brings to the table. It's not a new trend, though. See e.g. medicine, architecture, civil engineering - licensed professionals aren't doing the bulk of the work, but they're in the loop and well-compensated for verifying and signing off on the work done by less-paid technicians. Ironic that this liability issue is one of the big…

> Ironic that this liability issue is one of the big ways that "software engineer" isn't like any other kind of engineer.

In context discussed here, it generally is. Licensed engineers are independent (or at least supposed to be), which adds an otherwise interesting cross-organizational dimension, but in terms of having human in a loop, an employee with the right set of skills, deputized for this purpose by the company, is sufficient to make the organization compliant and let the liability flow elsewhere. That can be a software engineer, for matters relevant to tech solutions, but in different areas/contexts, it doesn't have to be an engineer (licensed or otherwise) at all.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#318

Post by Ferrus91 »

thunky wrote: post #186
Loughla wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The item lost is pipeline of talent in all of this though. Precision machining is going through an absolute nightmare where the journeymen or master machinists are aging out of the work force. These were people who originally learned on manual machines, and upgraded to CNC over the years. The pipeline collapsed about 1997. Now there are no apprentice machinists to replace the skills of the retiring workforce. This wi…

> The item lost is pipeline of talent in all of this though. Totally agree. However, I think this pipeline has been taking a hit for a while already because juniors as a whole have been devaluing themselves: if we expect them to leave after one year, what's the point of hiring and training them? Only helping their next employer at that point.

> However, I think this pipeline has been taking a hit for a while already because juniors as a whole have been devaluing themselves

I have seen the standards for junior devs in free fall for a few years as they hired tons of bootcamp fodder over the last few years. I have lost count of the number of whinging junior devs who think SQL or regex is 'too hard' for their poor little brains. No wonder they are being replaced by a probabilistic magician's hat.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#319

Post by lazarus01 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #287
seba_dos1 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

> 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. That was my impression with Perplexity too, which is why I mostly stopped using it, except for when I need a large search space covered fast and am willing to double-check anything that isn't obviously correct. Most of the time, it's o3. I guess this i…

This is called deprivation sensitivity. It’s different from intellectual curiosity, where the former is a need to understand vs. the latter, which is a need to know.

Deprivation sensitivity comes with anxiety and stress. Where intellectual curiosity is associated with joyous exploration.

I score very high with deprivation sensitivity. I have unbridled drive to acquire and retain important information.

It’s a blessing and curse. An exhausting way 2 live. I love it but sometimes wish I was not neurodivergent.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#320

Post by saulpw »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #309
saulpw wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each FTE doing that manual data pipelining work is also validating that work, and they have a quasi-legal responsibility to do their job correctly and on time. They may have substantial emotional investment in the company, whether survival instinct to not be fired, or ambition to overperform, or ethics and sense to report a rogue manager through alternate channels. An LLM won't call other nodes in the organization to…

> An LLM won't call other nodes in the organization to check when it sees that the value is unreasonable for some out-of-context reason, like yesterday was a one-time-only bank holiday and so the value should be 0. Why not? LLMs are the first kind of technology that can take this kind of global view. We're not making much use of it in this way just yet, but considering "out-of-context reasons" and taking a wider pers…

> considering "out-of-context reasons" and taking a wider perspective is pretty much the defining aspect of LLMs as general-purpose AI tools.

"out-of-context" literally means that the reason isn't in its context. Even if it can make the leap that the number should be zero if it's a bank holiday, how would an LLM know that yesterday was a one-off bank holiday? A human would only know through their lived experience that the markets were shut down, the news was making a big deal over it, etc. It's the same problem using cheap human labor in a different region of the world for this kind of thing; they can perform the mechanical task, but they don't have the context to detect the myriad of ways it can go subtly wrong.

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