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The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

lewiscampbell.tech

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Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#191

Post by daveguy »

gbnwl wrote: post #121
Arch-TK wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"actually good enough to meet the goals?" There's "okay for now" and then there's "this is so crap that if we set our bar this low we'll be knee deep in tech debt in a month". A lot of LLM output in the specific areas _I_ work in is firmly in that latter category and many times just doesn't work.

So I can tell you don’t use these tools, or at least much, because at the speed of development with them you’ll be knee deep in tech debt in a day, not a month, but as a corollary can have the same agentic coding tools undergo the equivalent of weeks of addressing tech debt the next day. Well, I think this applies to greenfield AI-first oriented projects that work this way from the get go and with few humans in the l…

I think you missed the your parent post's phrase "in the specific areas _I_ work in" ... LLMs are a lot better at crud and boilerplate than novel hardware interfaces and a bunch of other domains.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#193

Post by xupybd »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #87
j2kun wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author claims it's not just that one evangelizes it, but that they become hostile when someone claims to not have the same experience in response. I don't recall Either Willison or Antirez scaring people by saying they will be left behind or that they are just afraid of becoming irrelevant. Instead they just talk about their positive experiences using it. Willison and Antirez seem to be fine to live and let live…

Thanks for clarifying for people. And yeah, as I laid out in the article (that of course, very few people actually read, even though it was short...), I really don't mind how people make code. It's those that try so hard to convince the rest of us I find very suspect.

I'll convince you one day

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#195

Post by dcre »

I don't get who is saying this dreaded "you'll be left behind." The only place I see that is from straight-up slop accounts in the Twitter algo feed. Surely you're not letting those people make you feel bad.

> You see a lot of accomplished, prominent developers claiming they are more productive without it.

You also see a lot of accomplished, prominent developers claiming they are more productive with it, so I don't know what this is supposed to prove. The inverse argument is just as easy to make and just as spurious.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#196

Post by daveguy »

simonw wrote: post #71
frizlab wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, LLM evangelists will not be willing to admit this in general, or no, you, as an LLM evangelist, are not not willing to admit this?

The second.

Agreed, but do you honestly think LLMs have reached the level of average programmer? Or is it more a matter of "they can churn out code until I see something that is close enough and I'll make the last few edits"?

Also curious if you publish your working setup or if it changes as fast as the LLMs? Seems like you may have a more stable setup than most given how you are developing tools in the space.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#197

Post by gbnwl »

daveguy wrote: post #191
gbnwl wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I can tell you don’t use these tools, or at least much, because at the speed of development with them you’ll be knee deep in tech debt in a day, not a month, but as a corollary can have the same agentic coding tools undergo the equivalent of weeks of addressing tech debt the next day. Well, I think this applies to greenfield AI-first oriented projects that work this way from the get go and with few humans in the l…

I think you missed the your parent post's phrase "in the specific areas _I_ work in" ... LLMs are a lot better at crud and boilerplate than novel hardware interfaces and a bunch of other domains.

But why would it take a month to generate significant tech debt in novel domains, it would accrue even faster then right? The main idea I wanted to get across is that iteration speed is much faster so what's "tech debt" in the first pass, can be addressed much faster in future passes, which will happen on the order of days rather than sprints in the older paradigm. Yes the first iterations will have a bunch of issues but if you keep your hands on the controller you can get things to a decent state quickly. I think one of the biggest gaps I see in devs using these tools is what they do after the first pass.

Also, even for novel domains, using tools like deep research and the ability of these tools to straight up search through the internet, including public repos during the planning phase (you should be planning first before implementing right? You're not just opening a window and asking in a few sentences for a vaguely defined final product I hope) is a huge level up.

If there are repos, papers, articles, etc of your novel domain out there, there's a path to a successful research -> plan -> implement -> iterate path out there imo, especially when you get better at giving the tools ways to evaluate their own results, rather than going back and forth yourself for hours telling them "no, this part is wrong, no now this part is wrong, etc etc"

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#198

Post by Aperocky »

> That doing this is it's own skill and I have not spent enough time with it.

Yeah, this.

I sucked (still sucks?) at it too, I spent countless hours correcting them. And throwing away hours of "work" they made, And even had them nuking the workplace a couple times (thankfully, they were siloed). I still feel like I'm wasting too much time way too often and trying new things constantly.

But I always thought I can learn and improve on this tool and its associated ecosystem as much as the other programming tools and languages and frameworks I learned over the years.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#199

Post by anilgulecha »

"I am still willing to admit I am wrong. That I'm not holding the GPS properly. That navigating with real-time satellite data is its own skill and I have not spent enough time with it. I have changed how I get around before, and I'm sure I will do so again.

Map-reading evangelists, are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at driving a car? Maybe you once were. Maybe you never were."

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#200

Post by GorbachevyChase »

lbrito wrote: post #42
jraph wrote: post #14

This doesn't feel completely right. Simon Wilson (known for Django) has been doing a lot of LLM evangelism on his blog these days. Antirez (Redis) wrote a blog post recently with the same vibe. I doubt they are not good programmers. They are probably better than most of us, and I doubt they feel insecure because of the LLMs. Either I'm wrong, or there's something more to this. edit: to clarify, I'm not saying Simon a…

You seem to be mistaking set and members here. The piece's critique is against the set (LLM Evangelists), not against specific members of the set (the ones you mentioned). One can agree with the point of the piece while still acknowledging there are good programmers who are also LLM evangelists.

That is the basic argument for the utility of stereotypes too. I think the author is engaged in projection. I think the hecklers are the ones revealing their insecurities, which are justified. Even if AI progress were frozen today, the market conditions are going to change in ways that are hard to predict and a little bit of programming knowledge is not going to be the massive arbitrage opportunity that it used to be.
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