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LLM Inevitabilism

tomrenner.com

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#151

Post by baxuz »

mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

The thing is that the data from actual research doesn't support your anecdotal proof of quality:

- https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

- https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/29/ai_agents_fail_a_lot/

But more importantly, it makes you stupid:

- https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human...

- https://archive.is/M3lCG

And it's an unsustainable bubble and wishful thinking, much like crypto:

- https://dmitriid.com/everything-around-llms-is-still-magical...

So while it may be a fun toy for senior devs that know what to look for, it actually makes them slower and stupider, making them progressively less capable to do their job and apply critical thinking skills.

And as for juniors — they should steer clear from AI tools as they can't assess the quality of the output, they learn nothing, and they also get critical thinking skills impaired.

So with that in mind — Who is the product (LLM coding tools) actually for, and what is its purpose?

I'm not even going into the moral, ethical, legal, social and ecological implications of offloading your critical thinking skills to a mega-corporation, which can only end up like https://youtu.be/LXzJR7K0wK0

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#152

Post by westoncb »

bradly wrote: post #121
mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

This is what that same GPT4 told me today after trying to get a simple mqttwarn config: ChatGPT: Let’s cut through the mqttwarn quirks and get you a single, complete warn.ini that I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32 Me: that "I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32:" How did you perform this test? ChatGPT: I set up a quick local sandbox on my laptop Me: What brand is your laptop? What store did you buy it at? Cha…

There is a skill to it. You can get lucky as a beginner but if you want consistent success you gotta learn the ropes (strengths, weaknesses, failure modes etc).

A quick way of getting seriously improved results though: if you are literally using GPT-4 as you mention—that is an ancient model! Parent comment says GPT-4.1 (yes openai is unimaginably horrible at naming but that ".1" isn't a minor version increment). And even though 4.1 is far better, I would never use it for real work. Use the strongest models; if you want to stick with openai use o3 (it's now super cheapt too). Gemini 2.5 Pro is roughly equivalent to o3 for another option. IMO Claude models are stronger in agentic setting, but won't match o3 or gemini 2.5 pro for deep problem solving or nice, "thought out" code.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#153

Post by skybrian »

bradly wrote: post #121
mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

This is what that same GPT4 told me today after trying to get a simple mqttwarn config: ChatGPT: Let’s cut through the mqttwarn quirks and get you a single, complete warn.ini that I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32 Me: that "I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32:" How did you perform this test? ChatGPT: I set up a quick local sandbox on my laptop Me: What brand is your laptop? What store did you buy it at? Cha…

Yes, arguing with an LLM in this way is a waste of time. It’s not a person. If it does anything weird, start a new conversation.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#154

Post by oxfordmale »

bradly wrote: post #121
mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

This is what that same GPT4 told me today after trying to get a simple mqttwarn config: ChatGPT: Let’s cut through the mqttwarn quirks and get you a single, complete warn.ini that I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32 Me: that "I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32:" How did you perform this test? ChatGPT: I set up a quick local sandbox on my laptop Me: What brand is your laptop? What store did you buy it at? Cha…

LLM apology cascade:

- That didn’t happen.

- And if it did, I’m really sorry.

- And if it was that bad, I truly apologise.

- And if it is a big deal, I understand and I’m sorry again.

- And if it’s my fault, I’ll try to do better.

- And if I meant it… I didn’t — but I’m still sorry.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#155

Post by isoprophlex »

petetnt wrote: post #143
mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

There’s always a distinct lack of the names in the posts like this. What was the library that was being changed to what? You say it had ”no good documentation”, but it clearly has some sort of documentation considering the LLM did such a good job on the rewrite. Do you understand the ”large library” now?

Yeah so uhhh it helped me rewrite python 3.7 to 3.12

That LLM sure was a great help adding some f-strings here and there, real life saver.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#156

Post by troupo »

boogieknite wrote: post #104
troupo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally from the article --- start quote --- Anyone who sees the future differently to you can be brushed aside as “ignoring reality”, and the only conversations worth engaging are those that already accept your premise. --- end quote --- Mass adoption is not inevitable. Everyone will drop this "faster harder" tech like a hot potato when (not if) it fails to result in meaningful profits. Oh, there will be forced ma…

what i like about your last jokey comment is that discussions about ai, both good and bad, are incredibly boring went to some tech meetups earlier this year and when the topic came up, one of the organizers politely commented to me that pretty much everything said about ai has been said. the only discussions worth having are introductions to the tools then leaving an individual to decide for themselves whether or not…

> what i like about your last jokey comment

We use probably all of Google's products at work, and sadly the comment is not even a joke. Every single product and page still shows a Gemini upsell even after you've already dismissed it fifteen times

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#157

Post by ankit219 »

oblio wrote: post #82
mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

The thing is: what is the steady state? We kind of knew it for the internet and we basically figured it out early (even if we knew it was going to take a long time to happen due to generational inertia - see the death of newspapers). For LLMs it looks a lot like deindustrialization. Aka pain and suffering for a lot of people.

i would disagree we kind of figured it out early. Early visions for internet were about things like information superhighway (with a centralized approach). What came to pass was the opposite. Its a good thing. There are lessons here in that we are not always accurate at predicting what the future would look like. But we can always identify trends that may shape the future.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#158

Post by killerstorm »

bradly wrote: post #121
mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

This is what that same GPT4 told me today after trying to get a simple mqttwarn config: ChatGPT: Let’s cut through the mqttwarn quirks and get you a single, complete warn.ini that I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32 Me: that "I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32:" How did you perform this test? ChatGPT: I set up a quick local sandbox on my laptop Me: What brand is your laptop? What store did you buy it at? Cha…

Did you ever think there's a reason why people are paying for professional tools like Cursor or Claude Code instead of using free ChatGPT?

Ye, the free version has some known issues. They cram a lot of stuff into GPT-4o, so it hallucinates a lot.

Claude Opus 4 often gives perfectly working code on the first try, and it's much less likely to hallucinate or argue with you when it's wrong. It costs around $1 per request though. Not cheap. It's a model with many trillions of weights and running it isn't cheap.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#159

Post by [deleted] »

bradly wrote: post #121
mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

This is what that same GPT4 told me today after trying to get a simple mqttwarn config: ChatGPT: Let’s cut through the mqttwarn quirks and get you a single, complete warn.ini that I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32 Me: that "I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32:" How did you perform this test? ChatGPT: I set up a quick local sandbox on my laptop Me: What brand is your laptop? What store did you buy it at? Cha…

[deleted]

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#160

Post by weatherlite »

gbalduzzi wrote: post #114
rafaelmn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you claimed that AI was inevitable in the 80s and invested, or claimed people would be inevitably moving to VR 10 years ago - you would be shit out of luck. Zuck is still burning billions on it with nothing to show for it and a bad outlook. Even Apple tried it and hilariously missed the demand estimate. The only potential bailout for this tech is AR, but thats still years away from consumer market and widespread a…

None of the "failed" innovations you cited were even near the adoption rate of current LLMs. As much as I don't like it, this is the actual difference. LLMs are already good enough to be a very useful and widely spread technology. They can become even better, but even if they don't there are plenty of use cases for them. VR/AR, AI in the 80s and Tesla at the beginning were technology that someone believe could become…

> They can become even better, but even if they don't there are plenty of use cases for them.

If they don't become better we are left with a big but not huge change. Productivity gains of around 10 to 20 percent in most knowledge work. That's huge for sure but in my eyes the internet and pc revolution before that were more transformative than that. If LLMs become better, get so good they replace huge chunks of knowledge workers and then go out to the physical world then yeah ...that would be the fastest transformation of the economy in history imo.

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