Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway

theocharis.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 330 posts

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

#261

Post by xxs »

butterisgood wrote: post #202
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…

C led to an atrophy of assembly muscles. Though this is mostly different. A spec is NOT CODE. Someone still needs to understand what the code means. C optimizers are not the same as the radical departure of an LLM.

>C led to an atrophy of assembly muscles.

This is not true, though. Technically I don't do C but I used to do Assembly. Yet in Java code paths, to have a decent proof (and satisfactory results) of the optimizations made by JIT, PrintAssembly still works.

Assembly is not just the raw instructions that trigger microcode or knowing the latency of each one of them, or the (un)expected cache misses, it's the understanding the hardware, itself.

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

#262

Post by Zambyte »

dTal wrote: post #170
threethirtytwo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, the CHLCA (Chimpanzee–Human Last Common Ancestor) would be smarter than humans. It could be that chimpanzee intelligence declined faster than human intelligence. Unlikely, but I want to clarify that we did not evolve from chimpanzees. We share a common ancestor.

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

#263

Post by thewhitetulip »

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…

The amplification is what is causing the skills atrophy. When everyone is chasing max lines of code, we generate more code than what we can realistically write.

And it's not like we can not use LLM because others are using it in a craze to get the next promotion so you have to use it and maximize your output even if your skills are atrophing

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

#264

Post by thewhitetulip »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #248

> And then there is the situation about junior engineers. There are actually two different points in there: a) you cannot trust the effort behind your junior’s code anymore, and b) seniors have no incentive left to teach juniors. If you are bringing in juniors with the expectation that they won’t produce any value for some time then it might be better to block them from using LLMs. Do this and you will get a better u…

Block juniors from LLM usage. But then how will we show metrics of AI usage??!?!

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

#265

Post by brabel »

astrange wrote: post #172
skydhash wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

Managers often still have code and team-lead responsibilities IME. First-line managers, that is. And then sometimes you report a memory leak and it gets fixed by a VP and you wonder if he doesn't have something better to do.

If the memory leak could cost the firm its reputation with important customers, then I doubt the VP had something better to do.

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

#266

Post by fatata123 »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #255
xnorswap wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using regex decades, but it never really stuck to do anything too complex, it was the perfect intersection of difficult and infrequent. ( And also variable - PCRE vs others customisations / non-regular parts, etc ). I am very glad that I can now just ask claude for a regex to achieve my intent. Does it mean I'll never master regex? Yes it does, but decades has shown that was unlikely to ever happen anyway.

How do you know that what it produces is correct? I’m wondering if by the time you have been explicit enough in your prompt you might as well have looked up what you needed. The expression is always terse so it’s not as if you are saving much typing.

[dead]

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

#267

Post by ryan_n »

sivakon wrote: post #246

> And then there are the geopolitical tensions. What happens if China or the US cut us off overnight from these technologies? Just a couple of weeks ago the US government showed it was able and willing to cut off non-US citizens from Anthropic’s latest frontier model. The only evidence you have is US here and all the frontier models from China are free to download. Pure projection. You can read China's AI strategy he…

I might be missing something but what exactly is being projected here? The US did what the author said. It's not farfetched to imagine geopolitical conflicts could, at some point, drive china to do something similar.

> all the frontier models from China are free to download

Maybe? Again, not hard to imagine that they might not be releasing their actual frontier models to the public.

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

#268

Post by Hugsbox »

mcv wrote: post #254
qsort wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will just point out the benefit is not as obvious as you think. Developers have consistently overestimated LLM I think there are two different claims here: - developers overestimate productivity gains, which is a solid finding in many of these studies. Skepticism of extremely large productivity gains is warranted and I flatly disbelieve "10x uplift" claims. - LLMs give no productivity uplift at all, which is much…

A few months ago, I heard a keynote speaker claim that LLMs did not give any measurable productivity gains, except in two fields: customer support and software development, where they resulted in about 30% productivity improvement. I forgot if he presented any sources, and if he did, I forgot those, but it sounds plausible to me. But instead of productivity, I'm much more interested in using it to improve quality. Yo…

I don't know how they're measuring productivity for customer support, but it certainly isn't in terms of customer satisfaction. People have never been happy with chatbots when they're trying to reach a human.

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

#269

Post by locallost »

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…

Use it or lose it, but the problem is very old. The introduction of the alphabet/literacy almost certainly made people's memories worse -- up to that point they had to hold a lot more in their heads. At the same time it enabled a different better way to share information and learn. The question is thus, will it make the world better, is it a book or a TV?

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

#270

Post by Hugsbox »

fragmede wrote: post #240
annzabelle wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find Claude is shockingly slow. If it were genuinely instantaneous, it would be worth it, but I often find myself twiddling my thumbs while waiting for it to cook.

Yeah that's why you do multiple tasks and projects simultaneously.

That sounds like a really efficient way to very quickly produce a mountain of crap.
Post reply on HN