Your experience that "AI coding is bad" will match your belief that "AI coding is bad".
Maybe get an LLM to summarise the article for you?
The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
101–110 of 295 posts
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#102This doesn't feel completely right. Simon Wilson (known for Django) has been doing a lot of LLM evangelism on his blog these days. Antirez (Redis) wrote a blog post recently with the same vibe. I doubt they are not good programmers. They are probably better than most of us, and I doubt they feel insecure because of the LLMs. Either I'm wrong, or there's something more to this. edit: to clarify, I'm not saying Simon a…
The author claims it's not just that one evangelizes it, but that they become hostile when someone claims to not have the same experience in response. I don't recall Either Willison or Antirez scaring people by saying they will be left behind or that they are just afraid of becoming irrelevant. Instead they just talk about their positive experiences using it. Willison and Antirez seem to be fine to live and let live…
I think the actual problem is everyone tries to assert how capable or not coding agents currently are, but how useful they are depends so much on what you are trying to get them to do and also on your communication with the model. And often its hard to tell whether you're just prompting it wrong or if they're incapable of doing it.
By now we at least agree that stochastical parrots can be useful. It would be nice if the debate now was less polarized so we could focus on what makes them work better for some and worse for others other than just expectations.
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#103I think it goes further than this. Some people - some developers, even - do not _like_ programming computers. In fact, many hate it. Those people welcome the LLM agent stuff because it delivers the end product without going through the necessary pain (from their pov) of programming.
While I believe this may be true, there are also just people that get more reward from building than from the act of writing code. That doesn't mean they hate writing code, but that the building comes first. I count myself in that camp. If I can build better/faster with reasonably equal quality, I'll trade off the joy of programming for the joy of more building, of more high level problem solving and thinking, etc. I…
Yeah, that's pretty much what I think too. I'm much more of the latter type you mention, but I think I have the enough acumen to be practical most times.
Its always been the case that engineers come in many flavors, some more and some less business-inclined. The difference with AI imo is that it will (or already is) putting its trillion-dollar finger on the scale, such that there is less patience and space for people like me, and more for people like you.
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#104This is also bad evangelism, but on opposite side. Just because LLMs don't work for you outside of vibe-coding, doesn't mean it's the same for everyone. > LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers? Productive usage of LLMs in large scale projects become viable with excellent engineering (tests, patterns, documentation, clean code) so perhaps that question…
I think you should read the article again, because this comment is a straw man vis-a-vis the article.
Is it?
The article starts from the premise that LLMs are only good for vibe-coding.
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#105I just want some externally verifiable numbers. If AI is a 10x improvement, we should be seeing new operating systems. If it’s 5x we should see new game engines. If it’s 2x we should see massive amounts of new features for popular open source projects.
If it’s less than that, then it’s more like adding syntax highlighting or moving from Java to Ruby on Rails. Both of those were nice, but people weren’t breathlessly shouting about being left behind.
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#106Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#107Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…
> Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me.
That's hilarious LLM code is always very bad. It's only merit is it occasionally works.
> LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in.
I am sure that's not true.
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, isn't driving the business forward really what matters (outside of academia, open source, and other such endeavors). We live in a hyper competitive market. All else being equal, if company A can produce "millions of lines of slop", constantly living on the knife-edge of disaster but not falling over it, they will beat company B that artificially slows themselves down. Up until the point company A implodes, bu…
Sounds like you should go bundle sub-prime mortgages into some complex securities, if you like intentionally living on the knife's edge of disaster.
Huh? Where did I say that's what I like? I'm just trying to discuss for discussion's sake. Personally, I want a world that rewards the people who put their thought, care, and craftsmanship into something more than those that don't. In order to live in that world, I think we need to discuss the parts (maybe the whole) that don't and why that might be.
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most prolific coders are also more competent than average. Their proliferations are what have trained these models. These models are trained on incredibly successful projects written by masters of their fields. This is usually where I find the most pushback is that the most competent SWEs see it as theft and also useless to them since they have already spend years honing skills to work relentlessly and efficientl…
> The most prolific coders are also more competent than average This is absolutely not true lol, as anyone who's worked with a fabled 10X engineer will tell you. It's like saying the best civil engineer is the one that builds the most bridges. The best code looks real boring.
I've worked with a 10x engineer and indeed they were significantly more competent than the rest of the team in their execution and design. They've seen so many problems and had a chance to discard bad patterns and adopt/try out new ones.
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#110Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…
I've been playing with vibe coding a lot lately and I think in most cases, the current SOTA LLM's don't produce code that I'd be satisfied with. I kind of feel like LLM's are really really good at hacking on a messy and fragile structure, because they can "keep track many things in their head" BUT An LLM can write a PNG decoder that works in whatever language I choose in one or a few shots. I can do that too, but it…
I tried vibe coding a BMP decoder not too long ago with the rationale being “what’s simpler than BMP?”
What I got was an absolute mess that did not work at all. Perhaps this was because, in retrospect, BMP is not actually all that simple, a fact that I discovered when I did write a BMP decoder by hand. But I spent equal time vibe coding and real coding. At the end of the real coding session, I understood BMP, which I see as a benefit unto itself. This is perhaps a bit cynical but my hot take on vibe coders is that they place little value on understanding things.