Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

whynothugo.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 226 posts

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#91

Post by sponnath »

jvanderbot wrote: post #44
martinald wrote: post #20

I'm completely equally lost the other way. I've went through multiple phases of LLM usage for development. GPT3.5 era: wow this is amazing, oh. everything is hallucinated. not actually as useful as I first thought GPT4 era: very helpful as stackoverflow on steroids. Claude 3.5 Sonnet: have it open pretty much all the time, constantly asking questions and getting it to generate simple code (in the web UI) when it goes…

I'm convinced the vast difference in outcome with LLM use is a product of the vast difference in jobs. For front end work it's just amazing. Spits out boilerplate and makes alterations without any need of help. For domain specific backend, for example robotics, it's bad. Tries to puke bespoke a-star, or invents libraries and functions. I'm way better off hand coding these things. The problem is this is classic Gell M…

I don't think it's correct to generalize front-end work like this. I've found it very underwhelming for the kind of front-end stuff I do. It makes embarrassing mistakes. I've found it quite useful for a lot of the braindead code I need to write for CRUD backends though.

It's good at stuff that most competent engineers can get right while also having the sort of knowledge breadth an average engineer would lack. You really need to be a domain expert to accurately judge its output in specific areas.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#92

Post by nxobject »

tyfighter wrote: post #24

You're (they're?) not alone. This mirrors every experience I've had trying to give them a chance. I worry that I'm just speaking another language at this point. EDIT: Just to add context seeing other comments, I almost exclusively work in C++ on GPU drivers.

There's the market out there for a consultancy that will fine-tune an LLM for your unique platform, stack, and coding considerations of choice – especially with proprietary platforms. (IBM's probably doing it right now for their legacy mainframe systems.) No doubt Apple is trying to figure out how to get whatever frameworks they have cooking up ASAP into OpenAI etc.'s models.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#93

Post by rediscovery »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I think what people are missing is that they work sometimes and sometimes they don't work. People think "Oh, it works better when somebody else does it" or "There must be some model that does better than the one I am using" or "If I knew how to prompt better I'd get better results" or "There must be some other agentic IDE which is better than the one I am using." All those things might be true but they just change th…

Behavioral psychology goes a long way in explaining the weird distribution of responses to using LLMs to generate code:

"Gambling-like behavior in pigeons: ‘jackpot’ signals promote maladaptive risky choice"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-06641-x

The tech industry is actively promoting gambling addiction and the scary thing is that people are willingly walking into that trap.

Take a look at this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44849147

"Most of what I've learned from talking to people about their workflows is counterintuitive and subtle."

Seriously? Are we at the point of doing rain dances for these models and describing the moves as "counterintuitive and sublte"? This is some magical thinking level self delusion.

Downvote all you like, or ignore this. Agency is being taken away from us, no one gets to say we didn't see it coming down the line because we did and we said something and our peers treated us like ignorant and self interested for pointing out the obvious.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#94

Post by socalgal2 »

dnh44 wrote: post #10
avalys wrote: post #9

I have a degree in CS from MIT and did professional software engineering from 2004 - 2020. I recently started a company in another field and haven’t done any real development for about 4 years. Earlier this summer I took a vacation and decided to start a small software hobby project specific to my industry. I decided to try out Cursor for the first time. I found it incredibly helpful at saving time implementing all t…

Last summer I came back to software after about 12 years away and I pretty much had an identical experience to you with using AI as a helper to come back. I've now spent the last 6 months coding as much as I can in between consulting gigs. I'm not sure if I would have been able to get caught up so quickly without AI. I haven't had this much fun programming since I was at university hacking away on sun workstations, b…

> I haven't had this much fun programming

I'm glad you're having fun. I wish I was having fun. I've had mixed results but quite often, for me, the GPT goes off the rails and does something completely stupid. It then doubles down. It's like talking to complete idiot who happens to have moments of lucidiy. If I get lucky and get a lucid response it's great. But so often I get the nonsense response. I mean literally as bad as the "there 3 letter Bs in the word blueberry" answer eariler today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44832908) accept code instead of spelling. I wish I knew what I was doing wrong.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#95

Post by socalgal2 »

martinald wrote: post #20

I'm completely equally lost the other way. I've went through multiple phases of LLM usage for development. GPT3.5 era: wow this is amazing, oh. everything is hallucinated. not actually as useful as I first thought GPT4 era: very helpful as stackoverflow on steroids. Claude 3.5 Sonnet: have it open pretty much all the time, constantly asking questions and getting it to generate simple code (in the web UI) when it goes…

> This took less than an hour while I was watching TV.

I certainly could not review all of those changes in an uninterupted hour. I'd need to test the design changes on multiple browsers, check they respond to zoom and window sizing. I'd have to read through the tests and check that they were not just nonsense and returning true to pass. There's no way I could do all that while watching TV in 1 hour.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#96

Post by dumpsterdiver »

socalgal2 wrote: post #94
dnh44 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last summer I came back to software after about 12 years away and I pretty much had an identical experience to you with using AI as a helper to come back. I've now spent the last 6 months coding as much as I can in between consulting gigs. I'm not sure if I would have been able to get caught up so quickly without AI. I haven't had this much fun programming since I was at university hacking away on sun workstations, b…

> I haven't had this much fun programming I'm glad you're having fun. I wish I was having fun. I've had mixed results but quite often, for me, the GPT goes off the rails and does something completely stupid. It then doubles down. It's like talking to complete idiot who happens to have moments of lucidiy. If I get lucky and get a lucid response it's great. But so often I get the nonsense response. I mean literally as…

Just trying to help, but maybe the LLM is interpreting words like “accept” differently than you think they are.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#97

Post by poulpy123 »

I agree that LLM are best at providing good auto completion, and even more for someone who types slowly like me. They are also good for providing examples and simple programs for technologies I'm unfamiliar with, something that I was using Google search for when the web and the search results where not just SEO crap.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#99

Post by chii »

andrewstuart wrote: post #74

So weird that people use these tools and think they essentially useless. How can my experience be so totally different?

confirmation bias, preconceived notions etc. I've noticed many who claim the uselessness of these coding/llm are more often than not experienced engineers.

People i've talked to who are not coders have all found these coding tools to be very useful, enough to be worth paying for (approx. $20 bucks a month).

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#100

Post by globular-toast »

I'm going to properly write up my experiences with LLMs at some point, but some observations so far:

0. It's undeniable that LLMs are both amazing and fun. So is a clown at a children's birthday party, but you wouldn't try to ride the balloon horse,

1. If you are producing code in a language you are not familiar with, you need to be aware of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect[0],

2. It excels at language translation. This is what LLMs were originally designed for. So if you can clearly describe an algorithm in English, it will probably be able to translate that to Python, for example. But at that point you have to question why you didn't just write it in Python in the first place,

3. It gamifies things and causes you to work longer and harder. I'm not convinced it's really more efficient, but I am convinced I simply wouldn't have bothered to put in the effort to do certain things before because the perceived effort of writing code from scratch is higher than spinning a roulette wheel that might shit out the answer first time,

4. It stops you thinking for yourself. Ever worked with an incredibly knowledgable colleague who is always eager to help? Or got the feeling you've solved something before so spent time grepping through old codebases and bash history to find what you did last time instead of spending the exact same time doing it again? It's kinda like that except it knows everything and it's always there. I fear that ability will atrophy with extended use,

5. I don't feel like I really own the code it outputs. It feels more like working in a large existing codebase written by a team. When I have to get into things and understand the code it's like I'm reading it for the first time, even though I did check all the diffs etc. It's like having a manic junior run rampant then coming to you when something really needs to be understood. Again, it's the question of is this really saving me any time in the long run?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

Post reply on HN