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The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

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Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#151

Post by cognitiveinline »

grayhatter wrote: post #57
msdz wrote: post #2

> LLM’s amplify what you already have: opinions, structure, frameworks. So far, so agreeable, but… > If you have thoughts, they come out sharper and faster. I can’t help but wonder whether constant use of “agent” harnesses will lead to an atrophy of the software engineering (or really any field) muscles. Actual muscles need exercise to stay in shape (let alone grow), so does the brain. Can we really be sure that thou…

> Conversely, I also am a user of LLMs (true shocker these days, I know), and am noticing a speedup in areas I was already familiar with, and a quicker introduction to new ones. The obvious benefit cannot be denied, and doing so regardless makes you look uninformed. [Excluding people who don’t want anything to do with LLMs out of moral principle, which curiously just like the overarching topic I also both respect and…

I won't be as diplomatic as the other reponse to you. You are welcome to your reticence to agentic coding. But as you're no doubt observing, all your peers are saying they're moving ahead leaps and bounds.

Either all of them are wrong, or you will be left behind. Whatever the outcome, it will be on you, and you may make your peace with that.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#152

Post by Diogenesian »

GenerocUsername wrote: post #140
msdz wrote: post #2

> LLM’s amplify what you already have: opinions, structure, frameworks. So far, so agreeable, but… > If you have thoughts, they come out sharper and faster. I can’t help but wonder whether constant use of “agent” harnesses will lead to an atrophy of the software engineering (or really any field) muscles. Actual muscles need exercise to stay in shape (let alone grow), so does the brain. Can we really be sure that thou…

If cars did not exist, I would be healthier, able to walk and run many times further due to constant cardio exercise. I would still travel much less distance. And just like cars, LLMs will reshape the world to the point that our brains could not even get us to the supermarket because soon it will be 5 miles away and require a car ( or at least a local LLM bike )

FWIW a 5 mile walk is not a long walk. Humans are very much designed to make that trek without too much trouble. Lots of the world has people walking similar distances for fresh water, to go to school, etc.

The point being that cars also reshape your perception of the world. METR had trouble replicating their dev productivity study because devs have already become much whinier about doing things "manually." Things that were slightly tedious in 2022 have become impossibly difficult without AI in 2026.

It is striking to reread Lord of the Rings: so much of the story is spent walking in and observing the Middle-Earth wilderness, and there is a distinct "pantheism" absent from the movies. JRR Tolkien, being one of the first modern fantasy writers, was one of the last who remembered a life without cars.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#153

Post by cognitiveinline »

eamonnsullivan wrote: post #134

The one thing that had me reading to the end was the mention near the top of the environmental impact of LLMs, but he never got back to it. I'm currently writing an onboarding doc for my team, encouraging LLM use for some tasks. (OK, well, I'm actually procrastinating by reading HN). At the same time, I'm in a darkened office with tinfoil on the windows and a fan pointed at me because it's hell outside and it has bee…

Your commute is worse for the environment than your day's token usage, by a magnitude.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#154

Post by player1234 »

GenerocUsername wrote: post #140
msdz wrote: post #2

> LLM’s amplify what you already have: opinions, structure, frameworks. So far, so agreeable, but… > If you have thoughts, they come out sharper and faster. I can’t help but wonder whether constant use of “agent” harnesses will lead to an atrophy of the software engineering (or really any field) muscles. Actual muscles need exercise to stay in shape (let alone grow), so does the brain. Can we really be sure that thou…

If cars did not exist, I would be healthier, able to walk and run many times further due to constant cardio exercise. I would still travel much less distance. And just like cars, LLMs will reshape the world to the point that our brains could not even get us to the supermarket because soon it will be 5 miles away and require a car ( or at least a local LLM bike )

[dead]

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#155

Post by nicce »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #78
mark_and_sweep wrote: post #61

> a genuinely good tool that enriches your thinking A smartphone is also a genuinely good all-around tool. Even social media is a genuinely good tool for connecting people. Yet, I feel like we've been overly optimistic about the impact of said tools on us and our societies in the past two decades. Smartphones are so good, in fact, in some societies, half of us are addicted to them. Billions of people world-wide. I as…

There's a saying that the intelligence of an average prehistoric cave man should be, in general, higher than a modern day human simply because the lack of technology required stone age humans to be far more intelligent then we are today. Now you can survive by working as a clerk in McDs, but in the stone age you needed to be on your toes and smart af. LLMs are just continuing the trend humanity has long been travelin…

> Now you can survive by working as a clerk in McDs, but in the stone age you needed to be on your toes and smart af.

In stone age, you had to focus on other things than thinking to have enough food for the next day. And to survive otherwise.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#156

Post by perrygeo »

swiftcoder wrote: post #117

> I am a little bit scared to say this too: last month I spent almost 10k USD on tokens. It sounds so insane. What are people actually doing with all these tokens? I use LLMs pretty heavily for development, and I'm rarely spending all the tokens that come with a $10/month OpenCode Go subscription...

My heaviest LLM usage month came in at $45. So far this July, $6 and counting (it's been a light month). I can certainly imagine increasing my usage by several orders of magnitude but ... why? If I have something that needs to get done and an LLM can do it, great. But I'm not sitting here inventing reasons to waste money, which is apparently what the tokenmaxers are doing - as evidenced by the astounding lack of value produced by all this vibe coding.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#157

Post by ozim »

quantummagic wrote: post #92
cj wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't use calculator as an analogy, then. Calculators are a simple machine that implement very basic rules. LLMs are in a different category. The parallels you can draw between LLMs and calculators.. just don't make sense.

> The parallels you can draw between LLMs and calculators.. just don't make sense. The technology doesn't matter, you can compare to say the power loom from the 1700's. I'm comparing the reaction of humans; human's haven't changed that much. They always react the same when they feel threatened and emotionally challenged by a technology.

One up.

To Aristotle and Plato. Where Plato was against writing because people will become forgetful if they don’t train their minds remembering things.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#158

Post by BAM-DevCrew »

grayhatter wrote: post #57
msdz wrote: post #2

> LLM’s amplify what you already have: opinions, structure, frameworks. So far, so agreeable, but… > If you have thoughts, they come out sharper and faster. I can’t help but wonder whether constant use of “agent” harnesses will lead to an atrophy of the software engineering (or really any field) muscles. Actual muscles need exercise to stay in shape (let alone grow), so does the brain. Can we really be sure that thou…

> Conversely, I also am a user of LLMs (true shocker these days, I know), and am noticing a speedup in areas I was already familiar with, and a quicker introduction to new ones. The obvious benefit cannot be denied, and doing so regardless makes you look uninformed. [Excluding people who don’t want anything to do with LLMs out of moral principle, which curiously just like the overarching topic I also both respect and…

You need to create your own custom interface. Dive into the harness where the System Prompt lays and write instruction for the LLM to quadruple-check facts before presenting them. Instruct them to check and verify all outputs using tools of your preference before claiming their tasks are finished. Instruct them to review everything, to look for gaps in their reasoning and fix them, to never assume your intent but ask for clarity.. No doubt over the years you have developed a highly tuned arsenal of tools and protocols for work. Treat LLMs in the interface as a tool that you can lay your tuned arsenal over, recreating it as a filter your LLM works inside. Don't use vanilla interfaces and expect them to mirror your niche level of expertise. Over the last year I have developed a custom Claude Code interface using tweakCC, but other interfaces like PI and OpenCode are better documented. I am full on adhd and autistic, and have achieved as a result of access to LLMs things my neurology would never allowed me to achieve otherwise. I can bounce all over the place and still achieve excellence because of the hardcore customizations I have in place that account for my neurology. To me there is no middle ground. Slop is unacceptable. The harness and System Prompt is what moves LLMs to quality outputs.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#159

Post by eamonnsullivan »

cognitiveinline wrote: post #153
eamonnsullivan wrote: post #134

The one thing that had me reading to the end was the mention near the top of the environmental impact of LLMs, but he never got back to it. I'm currently writing an onboarding doc for my team, encouraging LLM use for some tasks. (OK, well, I'm actually procrastinating by reading HN). At the same time, I'm in a darkened office with tinfoil on the windows and a fan pointed at me because it's hell outside and it has bee…

Your commute is worse for the environment than your day's token usage, by a magnitude.

Well, I doubt that. I mostly work from home. But also I live in a big city (London) with a working public transport system.

Re: The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

#160

Post by exe34 »

westurner wrote: post #116
deaton wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the real disaster is that once you let the LLM work on a project for a bit, you start to lose understanding of what exactly is even happening under the hood in the project. You can take steps to mitigate this, but agents don't exactly encourage the behavior required to maintain a good understanding of what's going on.

Like becoming a manager? When a person becomes a manager, they do or do not have enough time and expertise to review all of the code that they trust the team to produce. Managers usually get into automated testing; unit tests, integration tests, acceptance tests, and maybe also BDD syntax Managers and developers are responsible for setting a test coverage threshold for merge approval. If there is 100% branch coverage…

I think what this fails to cover is that managers rely on other people to do that understanding and keeping things in mind. When there's a problem, the manager isn't just saying to a random person "go fix this", most of the time they're relying on somebody who has a deeper understanding of the problem and is not likely to randomly break something else just to fix this one bug.
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