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LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

blog.katanaquant.com

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Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#241

Post by m3kw9 »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #113
unlikelytomato wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm confused when people say it isn't ready to replace most of the programmer workforce.

LLM code is higher quality than any codes I have seen in my 20 years in F500. So yeah you need to "guide" it, and ensure that it will not bypass all the security guidance for ex...But at least you are in control, although the cognitive load is much higher as well than just "blind trust of what is delivered". But I can see the carnage with offshoring+LLM, or "most employees", including so call software engineer + LLM.

Offshoring pretty much guarantees a couple vibe coders will be there to operate

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#242

Post by m3kw9 »

lwansbrough wrote: post #105
unlikelytomato wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm confused when people say it isn't ready to replace most of the programmer workforce.

For me, I'll do the engineering work of designing a system, then give it the specific designs and constraints. I'll let it plan out the implementation, then I give it notes if it varies in ways I didn't expect. Once we agree on a solution, that's when I set it free. The frontier models usually do a pretty good job with this work flow at this point.

That’s vibe coding and you won’t read more than 20% of the code written that way. You really can’t build complex software that way

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#244

Post by treetalker »

This is my experience with how LLMs "draft" legal arguments: at first glance, it's plausible — but may be, and often is, invalid, unsound, and/or ill-advised.

The catch is that many judges lack the time, energy, or willingness to not only read the documents in detail, but also roll up their sleeves and dig into the arguments and cited authorities. (Some lack the skills, but those are extreme cases.) So the plausible argument (improperly and unfortunately) carries the day.

LLM use in litigation drafting is thus akin to insurgent/guerilla warfare: it take little time, energy, or thinking to create, yet orders of magnitude more to analyze and refute. (It's a species of Brandolini's Law / The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.) Thus justice suffers.

I imagine that this is analogous to the cognitive, technical, and "sub-optimal code" debt that LLM-produced code is generating and foisting upon future developers who will have to unravel it.

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#245

Post by _0ffh »

jghn wrote: post #214
_0ffh wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, that explains a lot about the F500, and their buzzword slogans like "culture of excellence". LLM code is still mostly absurdly bad, unless you tell it in painstaking detail what to do and what to avoid, and never ask it to do a bigger job at a time than a single function or very small class. Edit: I'll admit though that the detailed explanation is often still much less work than typing everything yourself. But i…

> unless you tell it in painstaking detail what to do and what to avoid, and never ask it to do a bigger job at a time than a single function or very small class. This is hyperbolic, but the general sentiment is accurate enough, at least for now. I've noticed a bimodal distribution of quality when using these tools. The people who approach the LLM from the lens of a combo architect & PM, do all the leg work, set up t…

> This is hyperbolic

Maybe a bit, but unfortunately sometimes not so much. I recently had an LLM write a couple of transforms on a tree in Python. The node class just had "kind" and "children" defined, nothing else. The LLM added new attributes to use in the new node kinds (Python allows to just do "foo.bar=baz" to add one). Apparently it saw a lot of code doing that during training.

I corrected the code by hand and modified the Node class to raise an error when new attributes are added, with an emphatic source code comment to not add new attributes.

A couple of sessions later it did it again, even adding it's own comment about circumventing the restriction! X-|

Anyways, I think I mostly agree with your assessment. I might be dating myself here, but I'm not even sure what happened that made "coding" grunt work. It used to be every "coder" was an "architect" as well, and did their own legwork as needed. Maybe labor shortages changed that.

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#246

Post by crazygringo »

riffraff wrote: post #126
Implicated wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to be snarky, with all due respect... this is a skill issue. It's a tool. It's a wildly effective and capable tool. I don't know how or why I have such a wildly different experience than so many that describe their experiences in a similar manner... but... nearly every time I come to the same conclusion that the input determines the output. > If they implement something with a not-so-great approach, they'l…

> Whew. Ok. You don't tell it the code is slow. Do you tell your coworker "Hey, your code is slow" and expect great results? Yes? Why don't you? They are capable people that just didn't notice something, id I notice some telemetry and tell them "hey this is slow" they are expected to understand the reason(s).

...no?

"Your code is slow" is essentially meaningless.

A normal human conversation would specify which code/tasks/etc., how long it's currently taking, how much faster it needs to be, and why. And then potentially a much longer conversation about the tradeoffs involved in making in faster. E.g. a new index on the database that will make it gigabytes larger, a lookup table that will take up a ton more memory, etc. Does the feature itself need to be changed to be less capable in order to achieve the speed requirements?

If someone told me "hey your code is slow" and walked away, I'd just laugh, I think. It's not a serious or actionable statement.

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#248

Post by queenkjuul »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #113
unlikelytomato wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm confused when people say it isn't ready to replace most of the programmer workforce.

LLM code is higher quality than any codes I have seen in my 20 years in F500. So yeah you need to "guide" it, and ensure that it will not bypass all the security guidance for ex...But at least you are in control, although the cognitive load is much higher as well than just "blind trust of what is delivered". But I can see the carnage with offshoring+LLM, or "most employees", including so call software engineer + LLM.

You've worked at some shitty places. Nothing I've seen from Claude matches even my worst coworker (and my last job was an F500)

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#249

Post by strken »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #247

Ok, I’ll bite: how is that different from humans?

Human behaviour is goal-directed because humans have executive function. When you turn off executive function by going to sleep, your brain will spit out dreams. Dream logic is famous for being plausible but unhinged.

I have the feeling that LLMs are effectively running on dream logic, and everything we've done to make them reason properly is insufficient to bring them up to human level.

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#250

Post by wood_spirit »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #247

Ok, I’ll bite: how is that different from humans?

It’s not. LLMs are just averaging their internet snapshot, after all.

But people want an AI that is objective and right. HN is where people who know the distinction hang out, but it’s not what the layperson things they are getting when they use this miraculous super hyped tool that everybody is raving about?

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