The Eternal Sloptember

I feel like with LLMs, it's like a situation where you are close to some feature or project and have a pretty good idea in your head already of how you'd implement it yourself "I'd do this and have an API with that and a database table foo for storing bar with index on baz" and you're keen to get started on it ...but then someone else gets assigned to work on it not you.

They do it a totally different way than you would have thought of doing it, and the code feels alien and weird because it doesn't follow your "design" and decisions you already had in your head before they started work on it. Is it "bad" or just not how you'd have done it?

I think that is ok. So long as the code works and meets all stated requirements and is secure and performant and uses good abstractions and is not full of hacks, then it's ok to let go. Sure maybe you'd have done it a different way but ultimately that doesn't matter.

This is only true in the beginning, when machines are still primitive (e.g. first automatic looms). Nowadays machines mostly yield much better quality than any human can produce (e.g. automated welding, anything CNC controlled). Many things are only possible to build with machines (e.g. semiconductors).

> A hand-crafted solid wood table is still superior to something from Ikea.

This is by choice. Ikea chooses to produce the cheapest furniture possible, using cheap, crappy materials. Other manufacturers still produce high quality furniture, which is much more expensive.

I would argue that this is quite the opposite. We may have this perception due to how mass-manufactured product are pushed to insane cost-saving measure due to harsh competition. But machine are far, far more accurate than human, and have been for years. A commercial CNC has insane tolerance, a pick and place machine can accurately place parts that human can barely see, a miter saw can make straight and angle cut that would be very hard using hand tools, ...

And I would argue that your example is even wrong. Almost all Ikea furniture use MDF, which is very dimensionally stable, and once protected with a veneer, is decently resistant to moisture. A solid wood table will contract, warp, etc, depending on the grain of the wood, the humidity, ... And will require much more care and regular use of surface treatment. Of course, "real" wood has its own advantage, but it is a matter of requirement. And even that "hand-craft" table is not hand-crafted. Any woodworking shop today use machines. Circular saw of many types, power drill, planing machines, ... Which are faster and more accurate than hand tool (although hand tool still have their place).

> Fundamentally, Luddites didn't like being replaced by a machine. They were skilled workers, who used to have very desirable skills. Most people didn't need their standard of quality (but customers had no choice.)

And that's the thing. As you mentioned, very few go to a woodworker to buy a several k$ furniture. Most go to mass-produces-cheap-but-decent furniture companies like Ikea because they don't have a whole month of salary to put in furniture. Machine can absolutely help create far better quality product. But the way of the world has always been to favor cheap but good enough goods.

The big difference with LLMs and "IA" is that they are not a circular saw, they are not a CNC, etc. They are not a tool made for a specific purpose and optimize for it that can reach insane tolerances that no human could match (and especially not as fast). They are, as the post mentioned, "a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming". There is not really any equivalent in human history. This is a bullshit machine that is scarily good at producing valid output.

It's why I think it is so controversial and why the dust still hasn't settled and why the usefulness of LLM are still subject of such heated debate. A miter saw will cut your plank at a 45-degree angle very fast and very accurately. If you do a lot of that, the benefit is obvious. But if you had a “magical” woodworking tool that could cut at an angle, drill counter-sink, glue veneer, etc, all-in-one but the tolerances are completely random, how useful would that be ? How much time would it save you ? It would be really tough to say.