[flagged]
Taste Is All That's Left
191–200 of 574 posts
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#192I don’t like the term taste, but the problem that I have is that LLMs don’t seem to work “good enough”. They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem, but stacking this on the scale of 3-4 devs over 6 months or so doesn’t seem to produce anything. One thing that I’m particularly frustrated with is the writing quality of LLMs. Like this is the thing that they should be able to do, but I would say almost everythi…
I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around? Obviously "good enough" was a poor pick of words of words on my behalf---and I'll gladly own it---but they should be "good enough" for something if a significant amount of resources keep getting allocated to them. Yes on a very personal level you look at LLM-generated code and think to yourself "wow this is gar…
> Yes on a very personal level you look at LLM-generated code and think to yourself "wow this is garbage" but what about the people, as pointed out many times in this thread, that simply do not care? Does that not count as "good enough"?
Aside from the "amateur" qualifier, the Booch quote below provides insight to those questions:
The amateur software engineer is always in search of magic,
some sensational method or tool whose application promises
to render software development trivial. It is the mark of
the professional software engineer to know that no such
panacea exist.[0]
So "good enough" depends on the stakeholders' definition of that valuation.
IOW, if a person tasked with delivering a solution can instead deliver garbage and still get paid for it, then it is "good enough" for some definition of same. If the people approving a person's remuneration are not satisfied with this type of work product, then the answer as to whether it is "good enough" or not will be quickly answered.
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#193Whenever I see "is doing a lot of work here", I assume it's AI-generated.
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#194My taste agrees with the point made but thinks this could've been a shorter article
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#195I don’t like the term taste, but the problem that I have is that LLMs don’t seem to work “good enough”. They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem, but stacking this on the scale of 3-4 devs over 6 months or so doesn’t seem to produce anything. One thing that I’m particularly frustrated with is the writing quality of LLMs. Like this is the thing that they should be able to do, but I would say almost everythi…
Since they can summarize, you'd really think they would be better at condensing their own output and cutting out the filler after. I wonder if you could use a specialized second pass for it or something?
Prompting is a skill.
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#196I don’t like the term taste, but the problem that I have is that LLMs don’t seem to work “good enough”. They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem, but stacking this on the scale of 3-4 devs over 6 months or so doesn’t seem to produce anything. One thing that I’m particularly frustrated with is the writing quality of LLMs. Like this is the thing that they should be able to do, but I would say almost everythi…
[deleted]
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#197This post makes two mistakes.
The first is an XKCD 605 (Extrapolating). The author makes bold predictions for the future as though they're inevitable, but gives zero evidence, because there is none, we're still at T=0. IBM is still in business. Wake me up when it's been taken out by someone vibe-designing a mainframe in kicad. Or even, let's see a dropbox clone get off the ground. Should be easy, right? (It's an HN tradition, after all.)
The second mistake is mistaking a large multiplier for infinity. The cost of code has not "collapsed to almost nothing" as the author claims. Talk to your CTO/CFO if you want the real story. They're probably freaking out over AI spend. But the point is, yes, AI has made things cheaper, but they didn't become monotonically zero.
AI had also raised the bar. You can't ship "good enough" anymore, it has to be great. And great still takes time. Time in QA, time obsessing over every workflow, time talking with customers and planning features.
Taste hasn't even entered the picture, and the analysis is already wrong.
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right now we're all training AI models on our taste. All of our chat logs are being uploaded, and the AI companies are training the models on them to get them right the first time. It will soon no longer require taste. Or at the very least be 95% of the way there on the first run.
This was the basic theory behind Tesla eventually being able to stop killing Tesla drivers with FSD. It has not worked out.
[deleted]
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the "essence" of engineering is having a cohesive vision for a larger plan. No quality large scale project can exist without it. And any seasoned engineer should understand by now that no SOTA LLM can produce quality engineering at scale.
Lol. That's not true at all. And not how projects are done on startups or big companies. Execute fast or get nowhere, a series of small wins get you to live long term.
Nah. You can succeed in every single individual thing but fail at the overall project because the parts don't align into anything that makes sense.
If you need examples, look at game dev. There's plenty of games that have good execution but aren't fun to play or they're a confusing mess because there wasn't good overall direction.
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#200I've run this thought experiment a number of times with different sections of my (relatively) diverse friend circle. I ask them a version of this question on repeat : "what if AI automates X aspect of your work?", and the final answer (either because of frustration with the loopy nature of the question or a genuine stopping point) arrives somewhere along the lines of "my judgement," "my knack," "my embodied nature,"…
> somewhere along the lines of "my judgement," "my knack," "my embodied nature," or "my quality of decision making."
Do your friends actually believe that AI can't automate these parts of their work? I think my answer would be that I'll just have to learn to do something else.
> I still happen to think that AI/LLMs will never be able to "fully" replace humans
Do you mean replace humans completely or just replace all the tasks humans don't want to do? I would hope that humans will still have a reason to live even if all the work is done by computers, and that the computers wouldn't intentionally wipe us all out.