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GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

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Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#141

Post by jvanderbot »

sponnath wrote: post #91
jvanderbot wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

Well I wasn't intending to generalize front end work as "easy enough for LLM" what I meant to say was that, since I have no experience with it, its output good enough for me. Classic Gell-Mann amnesia

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#142

Post by dyauspitr »

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…

If it’s going down the wrong path or doesn’t do something right the second time you ask, stop, copy everything to a new chat and continue.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#143

Post by dnh44 »

ath3nd wrote: post #134
dnh44 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that in that study all but one of the devs had hardly any experience with using AI tools.

> devs had hardly any experience with using AI tools. I love it, here come the "you are using it wrong" arguments! I thought these tools are so great, so awesome, that even without much experience they will help you? Or are they not so great and you actually gotta spend a considerable amount of time of learning them to see some return? Which one is it: - are LLMs groundbreaking and democratizing development making it…

>I thought these tools are so great, so awesome, that even without much experience they will help you?

I never made that claim, I don't think it's generally true, but I do think it can be true for some people.

Regarding the study, I pointed out why I thought it was limited in its scope. If someone did a study on the potential productivity gains of using emacs and they based the study on people who had only used it for a week it wouldn't be a particularly useful study. A Piano is not a useful tool for making music for someone who has only used it for a week either.

I do have a customer with no prior programming experience that has created custom software for his own small manufacturing business automating tedious tasks. I think that's pretty amazing and so does he.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#144

Post by satisfice »

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…

Accounts like this are well-meaning but unhelpful, because they do not explain the difference between our experiences and feelings.

I’m always left with one weak conclusion: “I guess that guy has low standards.”

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#145

Post by bgwalter »

> several of them are written by well-known developers who’ve been around for over a decade

All of whom had greater output in terms of volume and impact before LLMs. And it is always the same people who now get voted to the top as opposed to a couple of months ago, when one of them got ratio'd for one of his exuberant blog posts.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#146

Post by fwip »

anonzzzies wrote: post #115
mavamaarten wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree to a point. But I also would like to point out how alarming your take is. I mean you can easily compare this to trades and construction. Would you want a house that's built in a week by cheap foreign workers that don't know what they're doing? The end result looks great on the outside, and you can always let some other cheap worker fix some issues you're having! The electricity works! Until it doesn't and a f…

Nah, I specifically said HTML/CSS; I don't think crap CSS (if it works and is fast) will make the world a worse place. I don't include any logic/code into this take, just design/layout/ux. And in my workplace that's also the markup stuff that gets rewritten the most, so it's throw-away anyway compared to the backend stuff (we have code running that's well over 20 years old on the backend; frontend is 1-3 years). I ag…

Design/layout/ux have value (and I don't think you're saying they don't!) - when it's done by somebody who knows what they're doing, the result is perceivably better than when it's done by somebody like me who learned HTML for her myspace blog. Stuff like accessibility, "responsive design," theming, and stuff I probably haven't even heard of, all make websites easier and more intuitive to use.

As a silly example, an LLM will happily add all sorts of animated gifs to the screen for me, even if it makes the page take three times as long to load and more difficult to use.

It's a shame to lose well-crafted experiences in favor of the lowest-common-denominator that LLMs put out, just because they're cheaper.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#147

Post by ModernMech »

dnh44 wrote: post #124
socalgal2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

These are some of the things I do to try and get good results: - I prime the context of the LLM with any extra rules or instructions I want it to follow. - I also prime the context with every single file it needs to see in order to be able to do its job properly. Sometimes this can be two files but sometimes it can be 15 files. - I instruct the LLM in bullet point format for smaller edits. For larger edits I ask the…

This sounds less like engineering advice and more like spellcasting advice.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#148

Post by simonw »

bgwalter wrote: post #145

> several of them are written by well-known developers who’ve been around for over a decade All of whom had greater output in terms of volume and impact before LLMs. And it is always the same people who now get voted to the top as opposed to a couple of months ago, when one of them got ratio'd for one of his exuberant blog posts.

You're just making things up to fit your own narrative at this point.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#149

Post by fuzzzerd »

gndk wrote: post #139
iamben wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, fwiw I'm almost certainly not using Claude in the best possible way - I have a 'pro' (as in the ~$20 a month plan) and I just prompt. But in the 'Settings' section there's a bit that says: "What personal preferences should Claude consider in responses?" - I add stuff in there.

Ah thats interesting. I only use Claude Code right now and don't have anything in that section you mention. Wonder how/when its applied and if it is also applied to CC...

With Claude code you can have a personal, project (shared) and project local set of memory files.

I would put the bits about clarifying questions in your personal (machine level) claude.MD file so it applies across projects.

Re: GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

#150

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

devjab wrote: post #77
andrewstuart wrote: post #74

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

I think it depends a lot on what you're trying to get them to do and what you're working on. I don't really buy into the whole "prompt engineering" part. I use agents quite a lot, but they have limitations. They excel at writing SQL, kubernetes configuration, bicep and similar... at least so long as you know what you're doing. I also have quite a lot of success with them keeping documentation and tests updated. I wou…

> Bad from a traditionalist software engineering perspective, but great from a business perspective (which is what matters). Not everything needs to scale after all. Anyway, I do question whether the author has actually worked with LLM's a lot. I would think that the strengths failings of LLM's would get obvious rather quickly to anyone who uses them.

Few things I've seen here.

> If you're working in a field where "good enough" is fine, then I imagine that LLM's can do a lot for you.

There's some specific timesheet software used for Gov Contractors that's hands-down, the worst web "application" I've ever used. Opening devTools on one of these pages is a riot--one of the "APIs" used return HTML documents with js file extensions so the browser fails to parse, every JS file is 1K lines long with blocks of global variables with various naming conventions, using 'back' in the browser just sort of fails and returns you to the sign-in page.

Any modern web programmer would have a stroke looking at this thing. Apparently it's the standard software used for this purpose, relied on all over the industry.

At a previous employer, I had to deal with some internal site for financial transactions and billing. Same story, ancient looking and performing web 'app' that had specific incantations to get it to actually work "don't refresh the page until that loads", piles of JS vomiting bizarre errors in the console, just a remarkable piece of junk.

Anyway, short story long, there's LOADS of software that's terrible by any metric that have crucial purposes floating around that are far worse in terms of 'code quality' than any LLM would spit out.

Also, I have more experience than I like to remember dealing with 'body shop' codebases. There is no way that an LLM is even capable of generating such low quality code. I legitimately think several of the projects I saw were sabotage; there's no way a human would deliberately write such inscrutable junk. Ever seen random python runtime errors cause the type of something would change depending on which branches were hit?

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