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Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

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Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#351

Post by hsaliak »

bcherny wrote: post #166
jeremyjh wrote: post #62

These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you: Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your tho…

(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. At first the code output wasn't good enough, and humans read and iterated on the code all day, so the details of the source code mattered. Now, the code is largely high quality and it meets a la…

Nobody is going to read that though, reading will go the way of code reviews. That’s the problem.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#352

Post by sublinear »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #335
gopher_space wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t imagine a client allowing me to pass the buck like this.

How so? As long as it works to spec, I haven't had anyone care. They literally hire people so they don't need to care about the details. Put money in, get working software out. And, AI is rapidly getting better than people at both code review and authorship, so a human deeply involved is turning into nothing but a slowdown. The main purpose people have is testing that the specs were, in fact, implemented properly.

I guarantee your specs/testing are either inadequate and/or you're not leveraging lots of existing (and probably free open source) code that was already written by humans and meets the spec better without ever needing an LLM.

The vast majority of properly written software was already plumbing well over a decade ago. The software engineering is making high level decisions based on experience with respect to the existing tools and the needs of the business. If you're not already using LLMs that way, you would have been a similarly bad manager of human devs writing similar inadequate slop. Less code has always been better code.

The line in the sand for these arguments really ought to be whether you think LLMs are better than humans who actually know what they're doing.

If you think LLMs are better, or could get better while continuing to use statistical methods, you automatically lose the argument (delusional/ignorant) and any hope of regaining credibility. That's not dogma. That's the science.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#353

Post by anigbrowl »

I'm gonna be contrarian here and say this is a Good Thing. It's very easy to tag to tag this sort of writing, and that makes it an absolutely great signal about hte people who post it. The more vacuous or frequent it is, they less weight you can accord them and the easier it probably is to get past their filters and make use of them for your own ends.

Is that morally bad? Guess that depends on exactly how you make use of them and what those ends are. If you an encourage an idiot to praise your competitor's product in order to get a reverse halo effect, that's kinda bad. If you give them some empty flattery in order to bridge a contact with someone you actually want to connect with, that's probably OK. The point is that uncritical LLM repetition tells you something about the person and lets you see past metrics like the apparent amount of wealth they have, the intimidatingly deep resume, or the degree size or centrality of their network. Two things, in fact: they post any old thing that brings in the clicks, and they're cheap. Previously many of these people probably paid someone to ghost-write their commercial affirmations.

Conclusory zinger goes here - punch up the dramatic contrast PS I'm reducing your fee to 10c/word, hope that's OK. Inflation

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#354

Post by Plont »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #284
JoshTriplett wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be not picking up on the subtext here. Others are, though.

There is no subtext to bigstrat2003's argument, other than "I'm wrong, and I don't care." If you give persistent, repeatable instructions to a computer, you are programming it. If you disagree, you are gatekeeping. It's that simple. The most popular programming languages in 2030 will, in fact, be English and Mandarin. Deal with it and get over it. ---------------- Edit, to bcrosby95: Look up the etymology of the word…

LLMs do not produce repeatable results, by their nature. Two people can give the exact same prompt to the exact same LLM and get different results. It's not a straightforward 1 + 1 always equals 2 process. This is like telling someone else to code something for you. You relinquish control of all the details.

Calling it gatekeeping is just laughable. That's like saying it's gatekeeping to say that the painter painted their painting, and that the person who commissioned the painting did not paint it. It's wholely absurd.

Anybody can pick up a book and learn to actually code themselves. Or you can use an LLM to try to make things without bothering with that. But even if the LLM worked perfectly, pretending these are the same thing is silly.

The history of the word computer is obviously irrelevant. Words change, it turns out.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#355

Post by duped »

bcherny wrote: post #166
jeremyjh wrote: post #62

These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you: Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your tho…

(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. At first the code output wasn't good enough, and humans read and iterated on the code all day, so the details of the source code mattered. Now, the code is largely high quality and it meets a la…

> You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document.

This is just noise generation. If anyone is meant to actually read the document it should be written by you.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#356

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

jeremyjh wrote: post #62

These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you: Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your tho…

> Perhaps I'm just too painstaking a type of person, but I can't grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing, so I had to actually get my hands working and write these words.

> As I write, I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths.

- Murakami, "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running"

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#357

Post by CamperBob2 »

Plont wrote: post #354
CamperBob2 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no subtext to bigstrat2003's argument, other than "I'm wrong, and I don't care." If you give persistent, repeatable instructions to a computer, you are programming it. If you disagree, you are gatekeeping. It's that simple. The most popular programming languages in 2030 will, in fact, be English and Mandarin. Deal with it and get over it. ---------------- Edit, to bcrosby95: Look up the etymology of the word…

LLMs do not produce repeatable results, by their nature. Two people can give the exact same prompt to the exact same LLM and get different results. It's not a straightforward 1 + 1 always equals 2 process. This is like telling someone else to code something for you. You relinquish control of all the details. Calling it gatekeeping is just laughable. That's like saying it's gatekeeping to say that the painter painted…

LLMs do not produce repeatable results, by their nature.

Neither do humans.

Two people can give the exact same prompt to the exact same LLM and get different results.

No one cares.

This is like telling someone else to code something for you.

Exactly.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#359

Post by zkldi »

bcherny wrote: post #166
jeremyjh wrote: post #62

These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you: Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your tho…

(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. At first the code output wasn't good enough, and humans read and iterated on the code all day, so the details of the source code mattered. Now, the code is largely high quality and it meets a la…

Expands into a document for _who_ to read? another LLM to re-compress?

It's baffling you people are in control of such a strong product when you are obsessed with this intellectual pornography; wow - look at how smart it made my thoughts look (n.b. look, not read). Don't look too close. And certainly don't ask me what it means.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#360

Post by qsera »

mitxela wrote: post #307
qsera wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we cannot conceive.. That is it. We cannot concieve it because we are new to it. Just like we would think of Stackoverflow as intelligent if we are fresh off the jungle and are not aware of how Internet works. Because without know that, we cannot conceive how Stackoverflow can produce answers without it "understanding"

Stack Overflow is made of humans with understanding...

You would not know that if you was a cave man. Nor would you understand how a large number of humans are able to come together to answer questions through the Internet..

To you, you type your questions, and answers appear. That would look like how LLMs appear to us now.

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