this won't age well.
LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
301–310 of 460 posts
Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#302Ok, I’ll bite: how is that different from humans?
What I'm surprises me about the current development environment is the acceleration of technical debt. When I was developing my skills the nagging feeling that I didn't quite understand the technology was a big dark cloud. I felt this clopud was technical debt. This was always what I was working against.
I see current expectations that technical debt doesn't matter. The current tools embrace superficial understand. These tools to paper over the debt. There is no need for deeper understanding of the problem or solution. The tools take care of it behind the scenes.
Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#303This 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…
> 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.
The same goes for coding. I have coworkers who use it to generate entire PRs. They can crank out two thousand lines of code that includes tests "proving" that it works, but may or may not actually be nonsense, in minutes. And then some poor bastard like me has to spend half a day reviewing it.
When code is written by a human that I know and trust, I can assume that they at least made reasonable, if not always correct, decisions. I can't assume that with AI, so I have to scrutinize every single line. And when it inevitably turns out that the AI has come up with some ass-backwards architecture, the burden is on me to understand it and explain why it's wrong and how to fix it to the "developer" who hasn't bothered to even read his own PR.
I'm seriously considering proposing that if you use AI to generate a PR at my company, the story points get credited to the reviewer.
Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, Gell-Mann amnesia exists, but remember that its origin is actually human, in the form of newspaper writers. So, how can we trust humans the same way? In just the same way, AI cannot also be fully trusted.
The current way of doing AI cannot be trusted. that doesn’t mean the future won’t herald a way of using what a transformer is good at - interfacing with humans - to translate to and interact with something that can be a lot more sound and objective.
You're falling into the extrapolation fallacy, there is no reason to think that the future won't have the same issues as today in terms of hallucinations.
And even if they were solved, how would that even work? The world is not sound and objective.
Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t a modern LLM with thinking tokens fairly goal directed? But yes, we hallucinate in our sleep while LLMs will hallucinate details if the prompt isn’t grounded enough.
Assuming this is not a rhetorical question: no, it is not. The only "goal" is to maximize plausibility.
Again, how is that different from humans? I’m not going around trying to prove my code correct when I write it manually.
Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#306Just a recent anecdote, I asked the newest Codex to create a UI element that would persist its value on change. I'm using Datastar and have the manual saved on-disk and linked from the AGENTS.md. It's a simple html element with an annotation, a new backend route, and updating a data model. And there are even examples of this elsewhere in the page/app. I've asked it to do why harder things so I thought it'd easily one…
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Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Papers show that AI also has a world model, so I don't think that's the right distinction.
Could you please cite these papers. If by AI you mean LLMs, that is not supported by what I know. If you mean a theoretical world-model-based AI, that's just a tautological statement.
Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do people keep insisting that LLMs don't follow a chain of reasoning process? Using the latest LLMs you can see exactly what they "think" and see the resultant output. Plausible code does not mean random code as you seem to imply, it means...code that could work for this particular situation.
Because they don't. The chain-of-reasoning feature is really just a way to get the LLM to prompt more. The fact that it generates these "thinking" steps does not mean it is using them for reasoning. It's most useful effect is making it seem to a human that there is a reasoning process.
How would you determine humans have reasoning then, in a way that LLMs do not?
Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#309s/code/stuff/
Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#310Earlier 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…
> The people who walk up and say "sudo make me a sandwich" do not.
My personal beef is the human devs get "make me a sandwich", and the LLM superfans now suddenly know how to specify requirements. That's fine but don't look down your nose at people for not getting the same info.
This is happening now at my company where leadership won't explain what they want, won't answer questions, but now type all day into Claude and ChatGPT. Like you could have Slacked me the same info last year knuckleheads...