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What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

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Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#131

Post by gumballindie »

bumbledraven wrote: post #117
shanusmagnus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. As someone who used to be a dev but hasn't written code professionally in twelve years or so, it was such an amazing accelerant. My iteration loop was to contextualize it (in English and in code), ask how to do a thing, look at its response, tweak it, execute, see what happened, alter it some more. The fact that it usually had errors didn't bother me at all -- it got much of the way there, and it did so by do…

With GPT-4, you can often just paste the error message in without any further commentary, and it will reply with a modified version of the code that it thinks will fix the error.

And then you waste time fixing the error the "fix" gpt introduced. Clever.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#132

Post by gumballindie »

kyleyeats wrote: post #123
timacles wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s good at a beginner, early intermediate level when you need help with syntax and structuring basic things. It’s an excellent helper tool at that stage. But it’s obvious outside of jr dev work and hobby projects there’s no way it could possibly grasp enough context to be useful.

Stage? A lot of developers don't realize that they're all the same personality type which is good at particular things. LLMs give everyone else this advantage. You just don't realize it yet because you were never aware of the advantage in the first place.

> they're all the same personality

Yeah usually it was the shittiest managers I ever met that shared this belief. It sounds like they all repeat the same thing - gpt is a better google.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#133

Post by mywittyname »

hirundo wrote: post #121
croo wrote: post #83

I'll tell you my vision which is kinda long term - like 20-30 year from now on. I think the future is that everyone will have their own personalized AI assistant on their phone. Internet as it is will be mostly useless because only robots will be able to wade through the generated shit ocean and the next generation will see it as the current see the TV - unimportant old boring low-entropy data which is not entertaini…

> the next generation will see it as the current see the TV - unimportant old boring low-entropy data which is not entertaining anymore. Don't you mean high-entropy data? High entropy data would be less orderly, more compressible, and have a lower signal to noise ratio ... like TV shows compared to a textbook.

Entropy is the "signal" within the noise.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#134

Post by alexyz12 »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #65

The modern internet and modern app experience has become so shitty. For example opening up Robinhood, transferring money from a bank account, and buying a stock is hidden behind a multitude of product driven dark patterns that turns what should be a low cognitive load task into a high cognitive load task. This is true for everything now days. I predict llm based agents will be used as a 3rd party layer on top of the…

Wouldn’t this avoid a lot of ad exposure that companies are currently enjoying? Why would they want to give that up by allowing you to use your llm instead?

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#135

Post by lewhoo »

I hope all the bold and rapid changes predicted here won't become reality so fast. I think the societal changes needed to somehow still function as a civilization will be too much for vast masses of people to handle resulting in some drastic decisions. I'm pretty pessimistic about this and can't shake it off, call it Yudkowsky syndrome.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#136

Post by j-a-a-p »

gumballindie wrote: post #50
ryanjshaw wrote: post #38

> I don’t believe that natural language is an adequate medium for conveying instructions with the precision required for many applications. Not clear to me if the author actually uses LLMs to do meaningful work, or is speculating about how they might be used. I've written about 2500 lines of F# for the first time in the past 1.5 weeks using ChatGPT-4 to guide me. It has been an constant back and forth, iterative proc…

To this day i am still wondering what kind of code people write that chatgpt can possibly help with. All my attempts lead to garbage and i would spend more time fixing the output of the chat bot than writing the actual code. It does help with some documentation. But even that has glitches.

Did some ETL with Python. ChatGTP got it right 99%. And, remarkably understood a public API that I was feeding from, which used 2-letter abbreviations.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#137

Post by mywittyname »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #65

The modern internet and modern app experience has become so shitty. For example opening up Robinhood, transferring money from a bank account, and buying a stock is hidden behind a multitude of product driven dark patterns that turns what should be a low cognitive load task into a high cognitive load task. This is true for everything now days. I predict llm based agents will be used as a 3rd party layer on top of the…

> I predict llm based agents will be used as a 3rd party layer on top of the modern web to work in users favor against enshitification.

I'm predicting the opposite -- LLMs will be used to turn Dark Patterns into Vantablack Patterns.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#138

Post by timacles »

kyleyeats wrote: post #123
timacles wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s good at a beginner, early intermediate level when you need help with syntax and structuring basic things. It’s an excellent helper tool at that stage. But it’s obvious outside of jr dev work and hobby projects there’s no way it could possibly grasp enough context to be useful.

Stage? A lot of developers don't realize that they're all the same personality type which is good at particular things. LLMs give everyone else this advantage. You just don't realize it yet because you were never aware of the advantage in the first place.

I'm not really following what you're trying to say. What is that personality type, and what are the things its good at? What is the LLM advantage?

Not saying your post is devoid of any substance, just trying to educate myself on my blindspots

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#139

Post by intended »

wbm1 wrote: post #100
croo wrote: post #83

I'll tell you my vision which is kinda long term - like 20-30 year from now on. I think the future is that everyone will have their own personalized AI assistant on their phone. Internet as it is will be mostly useless because only robots will be able to wade through the generated shit ocean and the next generation will see it as the current see the TV - unimportant old boring low-entropy data which is not entertaini…

An LLM/AI companion based on your ledger, that grows and evolves with you, acting as a sort of Socratic daimon, a psychologic twin, assistant, advisor, and sparring partner. Like a journal that talks back and thinks with you. It'd need to be only personally accessible and safe/private. Biometric access and local running could solve this.

This is the dream. That said - Gen AI on its own wont get us to helpers/Daemons.

Right now, if you want to build something like a daemon you will need multiple agents. When a task needs to be delegated, the central control system needs to be able to spin up a few processes and get them going.

You can do this right now. You can create an ensemble of personalities/roles (jr dev, sr dev, project manager) and have them plan.

They do a good job, if you are monitoring it. You can break up the plan into chunks, spin up more instances, distribute chunks and have those instances work on it.

Sadly this cant happen, and I think these are fundamental limits to Generative AI. Right now personas just go ahead and "pretend work" - they say we "I am now going to go and come up with a project plan".

You have a dependency where output from all prompts must be actionable, or verifiable. If output is off, then it snowballs.

This is not a tooling, or context window issue. This is a hard limit to what Generation can achieve. Its impressive that we got this level of emergence, but when you look at output in detail, its flawed.

This is the verification issue, and verification (or disproving something) is the essence of science.

Maybe something can be added to it, or entirely new structures can be built - but generation on its own will not take us over this threshold.

Right now, LLMs are more like actors. They are very good actors, but you dont get your prescriptions from actors.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#140

Post by [deleted] »

gumballindie wrote: post #50
ryanjshaw wrote: post #38

> I don’t believe that natural language is an adequate medium for conveying instructions with the precision required for many applications. Not clear to me if the author actually uses LLMs to do meaningful work, or is speculating about how they might be used. I've written about 2500 lines of F# for the first time in the past 1.5 weeks using ChatGPT-4 to guide me. It has been an constant back and forth, iterative proc…

To this day i am still wondering what kind of code people write that chatgpt can possibly help with. All my attempts lead to garbage and i would spend more time fixing the output of the chat bot than writing the actual code. It does help with some documentation. But even that has glitches.

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