The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
lewiscampbell.tech
The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
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Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#2I somewhat agree with this poster. However, I think the unfortunate reality of programming for money is that a mediocre programmer that pumps out millions of lines of slop that seems to drive the business forward and manages to hide disastrous bugs until after the contract / promotion cycle is over will get further ahead than the more competent programmer that delivers better, less buggy, less spaghetti code.
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#3Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me.
LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better.
These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a good prompt that activates the right weights, getting you higher quality output. But if you’re seeing output that is consistently better than what you produce by hand, you’re probably just below average at programming. And yes, it matters sometimes. Look at the number of software bugs we’re all subjected to.
And let’s not forget that code is a liability. Utilizing code that was “cheap” to generate has a cost, which I’m sure will be the subject of much conversation in the near future.
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#4mitchellh talked about how he vibe coded the one off visualization code for some blog post of his recently, and he seems like a fairly good programmer
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#5LLMs are really great at copy/pasting answers from stack overflow and fitting them to work in a given system. If your work is outside what is answerable on stack overflow you're going to end up fighting the results constantly.
Front end pages like a user settings page? Done. One shottable.
Nuanced data migration problems specific to your stack? You're going to be yelling at the agent.
> LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers? Maybe you once were. Maybe you never were.
A bit harsh considering that many of us used knowledge bases like SO for so long to figure out new problems that we were confronting.
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#6I see it only as a threat to those who have a deep hook into their role as a SWE.
If as a SWE you see the oncoming change and adapt to it, no issue.
If as a SWE you see the enablement of LLMs as an existential threat, then you will find many issues, and you will fail to adapt and have all kind of issues related to it.
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#7> And then, inevitably, comes the character evaluation, which goes something like this:
I saw a version of this yesterday where a commenter framed LLM-skepticism as a disappointing lack of "hacker" drive and ethos that should be applied to making "AI" toolchains work.
As you might guess, I disagreed: The "hacker" is not driven just by novelty in problems to solve, but in wanting to understand them on more than a surface layer. Messing with kludgy things until they somehow work is always a part of software engineering... but the motive and payoff comes from knowing how things work, and perceiving how they could work better.
What I "fear" from LLMs-in-coding is that they will provide an unlimited flow of "mess around until it works" drudgery tasks with none of the upside. The human role will be hammering at problems which don't really have a "root cause" (except in a stochastic sense) and for which there is never any permanent or clever fix.
Would we say someone is "not really an artist" just because they don't want to spend their days reviewing generated photos for extra-fingers, circling them, and hitting the "redo" button?
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#8[deleted]
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#9mitchellh talked about how he vibe coded the one off visualization code for some blog post of his recently, and he seems like a fairly good programmer
For good craftspeople bad tools are still tools. For bad craftspeople tools, good ones and bad ones, are just a way to produce more crap.
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#10How much longer until we get to just... let the results speak for themselves and stop relitigating an open question with no clear answer.
We're well past ad nauseum now. Let's talk about anything else.