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The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

theocharis.dev

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

#161

Post by skydhash »

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…

> 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

I can see managers getting involved into acceptance tests, but never in the other type of tests. And the verification mostly is involved into a quick manual testing/watching a demo. Code is not their concern. When there's a bug, they expect you to investigate and fix it.

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

#162

Post by therealdrag0 »

perrygeo wrote: post #156
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 valu…

You’re not even trying to use AI if that’s all you spend. I am not a tokenmaxer and it’s easy to max out my 20$ subscription just hacking on a simple web game. Working in a larger enterprise context it’s impossible for me to use AI daily and not spend hundreds of dollars.

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

#163

Post by cognitiveinline »

eamonnsullivan wrote: post #159
cognitiveinline wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I dont know what to tell you. I guess - correct your misconceptions?

Carbon footprint of commute is in KGs of CO2. A day's worth of AI, depending on model, is ~15-100g of CO2.

Heck food you eat has more than a few Kgs of footprint everyday.

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

#164

Post by ra0x3 »

breadzeppelin__ wrote: post #100
Diogenesian wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically my claim is "the relatively minor productivity uplift I would personally get out of agentic development is offset by the high cost, along with unresolved questions about long-term code maintainability, so I am not convinced that it is actually beneficial." IMO the bigger problem is that ~1.5x individual dev productivity uplift seems to translate into 1.05x uplift across the team. People have been waaaaay…

I am both a career developer and experienced team manager. from first hand experience the 1.5x im getting from AI is not flowing down to my team / org because why would i output 50% more when the pay environment and leadership are already underwhelming. That additional 50% productivity goes completely to side projects built on my second computer between 9-5 tasks

Great point. Devs have relatively no incentive to be more productive for their orgs, and all the incentive to be more productive on their own personal work. The AI benefit to devs is real, just not for large enterprises IMO outside of automating clerical/mundane work.

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

#165

Post by HDThoreaun »

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...

A lot of their usage was fable which is crazy expensive.

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

#166

Post by eamonnsullivan »

cognitiveinline wrote: post #163
eamonnsullivan wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I dont know what to tell you. I guess - correct your misconceptions? Carbon footprint of commute is in KGs of CO2. A day's worth of AI, depending on model, is ~15-100g of CO2. Heck food you eat has more than a few Kgs of footprint everyday.

I won't belabour the point, but I think someone needs to correct their misconceptions. You're comparing a single, average person's usage of AI in a day -- not the billions who actually use it. Then you are comparing it to an American's two-hour commute in an oversized SUV. (A commute on the Tube costs about 0.02991 kg per passenger, per kilometre.)

What about training those models? Or the usage of all of the data centres? The projections are that by 2028 a fifth of all energy consumption in the U.S. alone will be for AI.[1]

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...

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

#167

Post by [deleted] »

quantummagic wrote: post #103
dd8601fn wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And someone else always cries luddite if anyone says, “Hey guys, this isn’t what the salesman said.” What matters is the reality of the thing… which is exactly what everyone is discussing. As they should. We need more conversations like this, early. It could have saved us decades of bad practices with impossible expectations (see: agile).

But people can't separate their emotions from the "reality". The reality is, this technology has strengths and limitations. It has benefits and it has negative consequences. We can and will discuss all of that. But many people aren't operating from a detached analytical viewpoint. They're operating from an emotional, self-interested, defensive stance. And granted, there are just as many people operating from a utopia…

[deleted]

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

#168

Post by keeda »

adamas wrote: post #36

Do I understand that spend report right ? 10k USD in a month for AI tokens ? After talking about the environmental cost of AI ?

I did the napkin math (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46984659) -- LLMs + humans are way more resource efficient than humans alone, even if they speed you up by only 5%.

It's not because LLMs are that efficient, it's because humans are that inefficient.

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

#170

Post by dTal »

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…

That doesn't pass the sniff test, or chimpanzees would be smarter than humans.
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