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

Let's talk about LLMs

b-list.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 201 posts

Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#121

Post by jatora »

zapataband1 wrote: post #93
jatora wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uninformed opinion of someone who clearly doesnt consistently use AI coding tools, clearly. And why are you limiting it to 6 months? Whats wrong with you?

How many years of real-life, in-production problem solving/coding have you done? That's what I base how informed you are not how much you use your favorite new $100/month token-prediction subscription

15 years. But that's irrelevant to this point. The person im replying to clearly doesnt use the tools if they think there hasnt been constant improvement. "token-prediction subscription" is funny, coming from a glorified biological token predictor

Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#122

Post by ekidd »

tptacek wrote: post #70
ekidd wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unfortunate reality is that a lot of software does have hard constraints. And a lot of these constraints are "gatekept" by regulators, compliance policies, insurance companies, etc. If someone slops together a medical record system, and leaks a bunch of PHI, there will be consequences, even in the US. Similarly, good luck getting insurance against cyber attacks without a SOC2 audit or equivalent. I've had this co…

OK, I have no idea who you are, and this isn't personal, I'm responding to a comment and not a person --- but this is an argument that posits that one of the big problems with LLM software is "SOC2 audits". Since SOC2 audits are basically not a meaningful thing, I'm left wondering if the rest of your argument is similarly poorly supported. It feels like a dunk to write that. But I genuinely do think there's so much m…

No offense taken.

I was going to argue that companies got to choose their own auditors, so of course there were some bad ones out there. But looking at the market, it seems like (1) the race to the bottom has gotten ridiculous, and (2) the insurance companies do not currently trust the auditors in any meaningful way. So, yeah, point to you.

Once upon a time, I went through SOC2 audits where the auditors asked lots of questions about Vault and really tried to understand how credentials got handled. Sure, that was exceptional even at the time.

But that still leaves a whole pile of other audits and regulatory frameworks I need to comply with. Probably most of these frameworks will eventually accept "The code was written by an LLM and reviewed by an actual programmer." I am less certain that you'll be able to get away with vibe coding regulated systems any time soon.

Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#125

Post by tptacek »

ekidd wrote: post #122
tptacek wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I have no idea who you are, and this isn't personal, I'm responding to a comment and not a person --- but this is an argument that posits that one of the big problems with LLM software is "SOC2 audits". Since SOC2 audits are basically not a meaningful thing, I'm left wondering if the rest of your argument is similarly poorly supported. It feels like a dunk to write that. But I genuinely do think there's so much m…

No offense taken. I was going to argue that companies got to choose their own auditors, so of course there were some bad ones out there. But looking at the market, it seems like (1) the race to the bottom has gotten ridiculous, and (2) the insurance companies do not currently trust the auditors in any meaningful way. So, yeah, point to you. Once upon a time, I went through SOC2 audits where the auditors asked lots of…

SOC2 has never been about software resilience. You can create a set of attestations that will require you to present evidence to your auditors (who are ~accountants and will not know what the dotted quads of an IP address mean) about software quality, but there is no reason to do that and most organizations don't. SOC2 cares a great deal more about access management (in the "plotting on spreadsheet" sense) than it does about vulnerabilities.

My thing here is: you want to summon some kind of deus ex machina reason why the unpredictability (say) of agent-generated software will fail in the real world, but the concrete one you came up with fails to make that argument, pretty abruptly. Which makes me think the argument is less about the world as it is and more about the world as you'd hope it would be, if that makes sense.

Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#126

Post by atleastoptimal »

wavemode wrote: post #85
atleastoptimal wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complaining about every one off issue with LLM's ignores the bigger picture: they are getting better every month and there is no fundamental reason why they wouldn't surpass humans in coding. Everything else is secondary. All I would need from an LLM doubter is evidence that at tractable software engineering task LLM's are not improving. The strongest argument against the increasing general capabilities of LLM's are…

Your logic is flawed because, a thing can improve for an infinite amount of time while never surpassing a certain limit. It's called an asymptote. That being said, I don't even think that arguing about this from a mathematical perspective is a worthwhile use of time. Calling something an asymptote in the first place requires defining a quantifiable "X" and "Y", which we don't even have. What we have are a bunch of sy…

1. There’s no reason to believe AI capability improvement is approaching an asymptote, METR timelines, improvements on benchmarks, ARC-AGI are all at least linear 2. Even if it were asymptotic, it would be a huge assumption to assert that the asymptote is below general human intelligence, like human pattern recognition and cognition is some sort of universal limit like c

Also if LLM’s weren’t really getting better in general but just benchmaxxing, then it would be extremely lucky that this also happens to be leading to a general increase in coding capabilities that have been observed in more recent models.

AI has already surpassed 99% of humans in coding in narrow domains. The question is, how wide does the domain have to be before models no longer ever surpass humans? I’d wager we’d have to wait until scaling of compute infrastructure stops, wait 6 months, then see.

Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#128

Post by brazukadev »

aspenmartin wrote: post #113
paganel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very clear and extremely rapid improvement in a startlingly short amount of time. We're almost 6 months into all this AI-code madness and I've yet to see that "rapid improvement" you mention. As in software products that are genuinely better compared to 6 months ago, or new software products (and good software products at that) which would have not existed had this AI craze not happened.

Way more than six months. You may be talking about how the world looks from your vantage point, as well you should. But there’s a reason why the world doesn’t allocate trillions of dollars of capital based on that. I really value skeptical people and skepticism generally. But what I think skeptical people would prefer to consider themselves is: rational and reasonable, with their beliefs well calibrated. You’re not t…

> Every major tech company - the ones poised to get the first best rewards, have already gotten good incremental revenue from AI via ads ranking/recommendations (Google, Meta, etc.)

That's just software evolving. It happened before LLMs, it would happen without LLMs.

> good productivity increases due to scale of workforce and advanced in house tooling.

Exactly same case.

Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#129

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

aspenmartin wrote: post #113
paganel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very clear and extremely rapid improvement in a startlingly short amount of time. We're almost 6 months into all this AI-code madness and I've yet to see that "rapid improvement" you mention. As in software products that are genuinely better compared to 6 months ago, or new software products (and good software products at that) which would have not existed had this AI craze not happened.

Way more than six months. You may be talking about how the world looks from your vantage point, as well you should. But there’s a reason why the world doesn’t allocate trillions of dollars of capital based on that. I really value skeptical people and skepticism generally. But what I think skeptical people would prefer to consider themselves is: rational and reasonable, with their beliefs well calibrated. You’re not t…

Classic argumentum ad populum fallacy. The world allocated the equivalent of trillions to the dotcom bubble shortly before it became the dotcom bust, mortgage CDOs before the 2008 debt crisis, and the cryptocurrency mania before its bubble popped. The world has allocated vast sums of money to rather stupid things many, many times in the past.

Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#130

Post by marcus_holmes »

spopejoy wrote: post #120
marcus_holmes wrote: post #94

I was waiting for the "so I tried coding something with an LLM myself, and I found..." paragraph. But apparently the author never did try it, or at least if they did, they didn't write about it. This is a very academic approach to the subject - read what other people have written about it without ever doing it yourself. Study what someone said about LLM coding 50 years ago, before they were even invented, to see what…

> I was waiting for the "so I tried coding something with an LLM myself, and I found..." Why? Most of the article was about the productivity of teams. > This is a very academic approach to the subject - read what other people have written about it Meta-studies have tremendous value. He's asking a simple question: if LLMs are changing the world, let's look at what studies are showing. > My experience has been remarkab…

I had to go re-read the article to make sure, but it doesn't address teams or scaling to teams at all, so I'm not sure why you're asking about that?

The article is talking about inherent vs accidental complexity, amongst other points, and if the author had actually tried developing with an LLM, they might have worked out how LLM coding does address some of this.

Post reply on HN