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The Eternal Sloptember
121–130 of 389 posts
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don’t know what library to use in your specific language, do you think you know enough to have an LLM generate most of it?
YES. This line of thought is exactly why people are still skeptical of LLM's. LLM's are directionally right and if their answer "fits" then I take it at face value. I wrote a blog detailing the computational difference between "generation" and "verification" and why it matters for LLM's: https://simianwords.bearblog.dev/the-generation-vs-verificat... As an example: I asked the LLM "synonym for "provides" that also me…
People are skeptical of LLMs because the experiences they’ve had with LLMs. You can’t blog your way out those experiences.
I’m skeptical because I’ve seen this exact situation and I’ve seen the result be something that anyone experienced wouldn’t do.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#123Part of my job is working on trying to make these models productive for the large corporation I work for. It's a lot of throwing tomatoes at a wall and to a degree I see the issue he is talking about output seemingly having a certain ceiling. At the same time in no part of his post is any code snippet or anything to latch on to of "the model performed poorly here when it should have done this" - this style of critici…
> How are we really supposed to grasp their actual capabilities when no one will actually cite specifically what mistakes they are making. The mistakes they make are pretty subtle. Coding with LLMs can be like that scene in Whiplash – , not quite my tempo, , downbeat on 18, , you’re rushing, , dragging, … Like yeah it produces working code almost always and the code usually does what you asked. And yet it makes you w…
Yeah. It does this. Pretty consistently and replicably depending on the issue, in fact! Yet I can point exactly where it fails.
Why are we not showing the bad choices? On my computer I have hundreds of diffs stored by my agent code review tool that point to style/architecture failures (and in the end, the result of that iteration on the AI output)
I'm not quite sure how people are generating unsalvageable outputs. I'd never ship the result of a first AI pass, either. I review all the code and the architecture, within reason (eg: in Rust I don't preoccupy myself anymore with precisely scoping pub, or whatever, unless I'm making a library crate). I sent a "changes requested" prompt+json to my agent, and it interactively fixes everything (even style, even comments with manual patches with my in-review-tool editor)
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#124On the other hand we see success stories such as antirez using agents to work on Redis and Deepseek v4 flash inference.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#125> They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming Are we really still doing this?
Author here. I have never said that phrase before this blog post and certainly understand the absurdity of it. I certainly don't mean that you need something biological or whatever consciousness might or might not be. However there's still a distinction. Unless I'm responding to an LLM, you had a childhood. You learned about the world and space and agency before you ever learned how to program. And you didn't learn i…
For a lot (most) of what we do with programming, the process actually doesn't matter. I understand you are a real ass dude who is in this shit for the love of the game. I respect that. You are a true artisan and exist in a kind of rarified space. There will always be a place for people like you and in some senses you are correct - you are not replaceable by any AI as they currently function today.
However, 99.9999% of coding is not like that. Non-coders don't care about the code at all. They just care about outcomes. People don't care if it's "slop" if it works. Similar to bug prevalence, the optimal level of slop is not zero and will be decided by the market, not by coders.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#126Part of my job is working on trying to make these models productive for the large corporation I work for. It's a lot of throwing tomatoes at a wall and to a degree I see the issue he is talking about output seemingly having a certain ceiling. At the same time in no part of his post is any code snippet or anything to latch on to of "the model performed poorly here when it should have done this" - this style of critici…
This article goes into quite a lot of detailed examples that include code snippets that demonstrate poor architecture: https://blog.k10s.dev/im-going-back-to-writing-code-by-hand/
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#127"It’s definitely a better Google for most searches" This is dangerously incorrect. AI summaries of search results consistently return incorrect information and grossly oversimplified and thus misleading summaries, neither of which are detectable unless one either has prior domain knowledge or spends time drilling into search results to validate the AI output.
My experience with ChatGPT as a search engine - it is totally paranoid about checking and re-checking its answers by referencing them in multiple places (I usually read its thinking output). I have not seen an outright hallucination for at least a year. (It is of course a different situation with Google's "AI summary" which is wrong half of the time.)
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#128I'm in the "haven't written any code in a while" boat ATM. I'd love to see examples of issues that are so big that they warrant reverting to manual coding. My main issue has been the inconsistent quality across between model releases and the tendency to insert older APIs or documentation, especially with command line tools. I can understand if the model struggles with a million line monolithic codebase with a decade…
> I'm in the "haven't written any code in a while" boat ATM
How long do you think it will be before you can't write any code because you're out of practice?
One of the dangers of engineering management is that it can turn you into a person that can no longer do the thing.
Does that even matter?
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#129I think a lot of the problem with the current discourse is how black-and-white it is. Either you're a luddite or "ai pilled". In most cases, LLMs can get you 80-95% of the way, sometimes less, sometimes more. And heck, sometimes, it just gets you somewhere wrong. But it seems everyone is arguing about whether LLMs can be perfect software engineers in isolation running in a closet, and using that to say that LLMs do n…
Yes, exactly, it's 'us' not the AI, which is great. Why on earth would we ever remotely compare a 'tool' to 'a software engineer' ? The 'great delusion' is not that 'AI can't code' - because obviously it can, and very well. The problem is the 'anthropomorphism' and all this AGI nonsense. If we called it 'Stochastic Mechanisms' and did not 'personalize' our prompts, refer to them as 'chat' or give them 'personalities'…
You are a tool. You're a human resource, from the perspective of the organization. That pushes buttons on bunch of other tools. That's why you compare it.
Edit: I don't mean tool as a perjoritive.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#130"Things can be broken in ways that weren’t previously possible" and also "Things can work in ways that weren’t previously possible". It all depends on what the use the tool for, if you're a carpenter you're going to do a bad job regardless if you have a fancy hammer or a basic one. If you're an expert, give them a basic hammer and they'll do the work, give them a fancy hammer and they'll do the same, perhaps a little faster (or not).