71–80 of 284 posts
Cantrill jumps on every bandwagon. When he assisted in cancelling a Node developer (not a native English speaker) over pronouns he was following the Zeitgeist, now "Broadly speaking, LLM use is encouraged at Oxide." He is a long way from Sun.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, although LLMs definitely qualify as enabling developers compared to of today. The Internet itself is full of distractions. My younger self spent a crazy amount of time on IRC. So it's not different than spending time on say, Discord today. LLMs have pretty much a direct relationship with Google. The quality of the response has much to do with the quality of the prompt. If anything, it's the overwhelming natur…
Watching my juniors constantly fight the nonsense auto completion suggestions their LLM editor of choice put in front of them, or worse watching them accept it and proceed to get entirely lost in the sauce, I’m not entirely convinced that the autocompletion part of it is the best one. Tools like Claude code with ask/plan mode seem to be better in my experience, though I absolutely do wonder about the lack of typing c…
For interns/junior engineers, the choice is: comprehension VS career.
And I won't be surprised if most of them will go with career now, and comprehension.. well thanks maybe tomorrow (or never).
A measured, comprehensive, and sensible take. Not surprising from Bryan. This was a nice line: > it’s just embarrassing — it’s as if the writer is walking around with their intellectual fly open. I think Oxide didn't include this in the RFD because they exclusively hire senior engineers, but in an organization that contains junior engineers I'd add something specific to help junior engineers understand how they shoul…
> That junior engineer possibly hasn't programmed without the tantalizing, even desperately tempting option to be assisted by an LLM. This gives me somewhat of a knee jerk reaction. When I started programming professionally in the 90s, the internet came of age and I remember being told "in my days, we had books and we remembered things" which of course is hilarious because today you can't possibly retain ALL the know…
But I mean, you can get by without memorizing stuff sure, but memorizing stuff does work out your brain and does help out in the long run? Isn't it possible we've reached the cliff of "helpful" tools to the point we are atrophying enough to be worse at our jobs?
Like, reading is surely better for the brain than watching TV. But constant cable TV wasn't enough to ruin our brains. What if we've got to the point it finally is enough?
A measured, comprehensive, and sensible take. Not surprising from Bryan. This was a nice line: > it’s just embarrassing — it’s as if the writer is walking around with their intellectual fly open. I think Oxide didn't include this in the RFD because they exclusively hire senior engineers, but in an organization that contains junior engineers I'd add something specific to help junior engineers understand how they shoul…
I remember in the very first class I ever took on Web Design the teacher spent an entire semester teaching "first principles" of HTML, CSS and JavaScript by writing it in Notepad. It was only then did she introduce us to the glory that was Adobe Dreamweaver, which (obviously) increased our productivity tenfold.
> When debugging a vexing problem one has little to lose by using an LLM — but perhaps also little to gain. This probably doesn't give them enough credit. If you can feed an LLM a list of crash dumps it can do a remarkable job producing both analyses and fixes. And I don't mean just for super obvious crashes. I was most impressed with a deadlock where numerous engineers and tried and failed to understand exactly how…
This is sort of the opposite of vibe coding, but LLMs are OK at that too.
> Wherever LLM-generated code is used, it becomes the responsibility of the engineer. As part of this process of taking responsibility, self-review becomes essential: LLM-generated code should not be reviewed by others if the responsible engineer has not themselves reviewed it. Moreover, once in the loop of peer review, generation should more or less be removed: if code review comments are addressed by wholesale re-g…
If you keep all edits to be driven by the LLM, you can use that knowledge later in the session or ask your model to commit the guidelines to long term memory.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like this would be a really interesting field to research. Does AI assisted coding result in fewer bugs, or more bugs, vs an unassisted human? I've been thinking about this as I do AoC with Copilot enabled. It's been nice for those "hmm how do I do that in $LANGUAGE again?" moments, but it's also wrote some nice looking snippets that don't do quite what I want it to. And many cases of "hmmm... that would wor…
I'm not sure about research, but I've used LLMs for a few things here at Oxide with (what I hope is) appropriate judgment. I'm currently trying out using Opus 4.5 to take care of a gnarly code reorganization that would take a human most of a week to do -- I spent a day writing a spec (by hand, with some editing advice from Claude Code), having it reviewed as a document for humans by humans, and feeding it into Opus 4…
As usual with Oxide's RFDs, I found myself vigorously head-nodding while reading. Somewhat rarely, I found a part that I found myself disagreeing with: > Unlike prose, however (which really should be handed in a polished form to an LLM to maximize the LLM’s efficacy), LLMs can be quite effective writing code de novo. Don't the same arguments against using LLMs to write one's prose also apply to code? Was this structu…
- I think the "if you use another model" rebuttal is becoming like the No True Scotsman of the LLM world. We can get concrete and discuss a specific model if need be.
- If the use case is "generate this function body for me", I agree that that's a pretty good use case. I've specifically seen problematic behavior for the other ways I'm seeing it OFTEN used, which is "write this feature for me", or trying to one shot too much functionality, where the LLM gets to touch data structures, abstractions, interface boundaries, etc.
- To analogize it to writing: They shouldn't/cannot write the whole book, they shouldn't/cannot write the table of contents, they cannot write a chapter, IMO even a paragraph is too much -- but if you write the first sentence and the last sentence of a paragraph, I think the interpolation can be a pretty reasonable starting point. Bringing it back to code for me means: function bodies are OK. Everything else gets questionable fast IME.
> Wherever LLM-generated code is used, it becomes the responsibility of the engineer. As part of this process of taking responsibility, self-review becomes essential: LLM-generated code should not be reviewed by others if the responsible engineer has not themselves reviewed it. Moreover, once in the loop of peer review, generation should more or less be removed: if code review comments are addressed by wholesale re-g…
I've found that your step 6 takes the vast majority of the time I spend programming with LLMs. Like 10X+ the combined total of time steps 1-5 take. And that's if the code the LLM produced actually works . If it doesn't work (which happens quite often), then even more handholding and corrections are needed. It's really a grind. I'm still not sure whether I am net saving time using these tools. I always wonder about th…
Anything that involves math or complicated conditions I take extra time on.
I feel I’m getting code written 2 to 3 times faster this way while maintaining high quality and confidence
> Wherever LLM-generated code is used, it becomes the responsibility of the engineer. As part of this process of taking responsibility, self-review becomes essential: LLM-generated code should not be reviewed by others if the responsible engineer has not themselves reviewed it. Moreover, once in the loop of peer review, generation should more or less be removed: if code review comments are addressed by wholesale re-g…
I've found that your step 6 takes the vast majority of the time I spend programming with LLMs. Like 10X+ the combined total of time steps 1-5 take. And that's if the code the LLM produced actually works . If it doesn't work (which happens quite often), then even more handholding and corrections are needed. It's really a grind. I'm still not sure whether I am net saving time using these tools. I always wonder about th…
It's not magic though, this still takes some time to do.