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

I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

nemo.foo

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 215 posts

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#131

Post by talldayo »

HPsquared wrote: post #48
talldayo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which involved complicated rust `no_std` and linker setup for compiling rust code onto bare metal RISCV from scratch. That's complicated, but I wouldn't say the resulting software is complex. You gave an LLM a repetitive, translation-based job, and you got good results back. I can also believe that an LLM could write up a dopey SAAS in half the time it would take a human to do the same. But having the right paramet…

What it will do is to free up a lot of brainpower to think about those hard problems and empower people to try our their ideas.

I used to think the exact same thing would happen when we paid Pakistani and Indian labor to do America's busywork.

That was about 15 years ago, I no longer have the same enthusiasm you do.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#132

Post by mordymoop »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #59
mordymoop wrote: post #41

I am frankly tired of seeing this kind of post on HN. I feel like the population of programmers is bifurcating into those who are committed to mastering these tools, learning to work around their limitations and working to leverage their strengths… and those who are committed to complaining about how they aren’t already perfect Culture Ship Minds. We get it. They’re not superintelligent at everything yet. They couldn…

>The thing that pushes me over the line into ranting territory is that computer programmers, of all people, should know that computers do what you tell them to. are you claiming LLMs function like computer program instructions? like they clearly don't operate like that at all.

They are closer to being deterministic machines that comply exactly with your instructions, for better or worse, than they are to magical pixies that guess what you must’ve actually meant. The implicit expectation demonstrated by many in the “loudly disappointed in LLMs” contingent seems to be that LLMs should just know what you meant, and then blame them for not correctly guessing it and delivering it.

I think LLMs have uncovered what we have always known in this industry: that people are, by default, bad at communicating their intent clearly and unambiguously.

If you express your intent to an LLM with sufficient clarity and disambiguation, it will rarely screw up. Often, we don’t have time to do this, and instead we aim for the sweet spot of sufficient but not exhaustive clarity. This can be fine if you are experienced with that particular LLM and you have a good feel for where its sweet spot actually is. If you miss that target, though, the LLM will not correctly infer your intended subtext. This is one of the things that requires experience. In fact, even the “same” LLM will change in its behavior and capabilities as it undergoes fine tuning. Sometimes it will even get worse at certain things.

All of this is to say, of course, you’re right that it’s not a compiler. But I think people fail in their application of LLMs for much the same reason that novice coders fail to get compilers to guess what they intended.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#133

Post by gsf_emergency_2 »

potsandpans wrote: post #10

Counterexample: Ive been able to complete more side projects in the last month leveraging llms than i have ever in my life. One of which I believe to have potential as a viable product, and another which involved complicated rust `no_std` and linker setup for compiling rust code onto bare metal RISCV from scratch. I think the key to being successful here is to realize that you're still at the wheel as an engineer. Th…

Ime engineers who find LLM useful have misunderstood their reasons for existence outside of being salaried..

What is your main project ? Do you LLM that? (

I wager you're not a rust expert and should maybe reconsider using rust in your main project.

FWIW asking LLM whether you should use rust ~ asking it about the meaning of life. Important questions that need answers, but not right away! (A week or 2 tops)

If you need to synthesize the universe of information with LLM.. that is not the universe you want to live or play in

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#134

Post by medhir »

Perhaps being a PM for several years has helped, I’ve had great success speeding up my programming workflows by prompting Claude with very specific, well defined tasks.

Like many others are saying, you need to be in the drivers seat and in control. The LLM is not going to fully complete your objectives for you, but it will speed you up when provided with enough context, especially on mundane boilerplate tasks.

I think the key to LLMs being useful is knowing how to prompt with enough context to get a useful output, and knowing what context is not important so the output doesn’t lead you in the wrong direction.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#136

Post by blast »

potsandpans wrote: post #10

Counterexample: Ive been able to complete more side projects in the last month leveraging llms than i have ever in my life. One of which I believe to have potential as a viable product, and another which involved complicated rust `no_std` and linker setup for compiling rust code onto bare metal RISCV from scratch. I think the key to being successful here is to realize that you're still at the wheel as an engineer. Th…

> The llm is there to rapidly synthesize the universe of information

That's a nice way of putting it.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#138

Post by jerf »

EarthMephit wrote: post #92
potsandpans wrote: post #10

Counterexample: Ive been able to complete more side projects in the last month leveraging llms than i have ever in my life. One of which I believe to have potential as a viable product, and another which involved complicated rust `no_std` and linker setup for compiling rust code onto bare metal RISCV from scratch. I think the key to being successful here is to realize that you're still at the wheel as an engineer. Th…

I find that LLMs are almost comically bad at projects that have a hardware component like RaspberryPi or Pico, or Ardunio. I think that its because often the libraries you use are niche or have a a few similar versions, the LLM really commonly hallucinated solutions and would continually suggest that library X did have that capability. I think because often in hardware projects you often hit a point where you can't d…

Based on my own modestly successful forays into that world, I have to imagine one problem the LLMs have in that space is terrible training data. A good three quarters of any search result you search for in that space will be straight-up out-of-date and not work on your system. Then you've got all the tiny variations between dozens of chipsets, and all the confidently wrong people on the internet telling you to do nonsensical things, entire ecosystems that basically poofed out of existence three years ago but are still full of all kinds of juicy search terms and Google juice... if I can hardly paw through this stuff with years of experience and the physical hardware right in front of me to verify claims with, I don't know how an LLM is supposed to paw through all that and produce a valid answer to any question in that space, without its own hardware to fiddle with directly.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#139

Post by 9cb14c1ec0 »

dutchbookmaker wrote: post #87
alfalfasprout wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single PR doesn't really "prove" anything. Optimization passes on well-tested narrowly scoped code are something that LLMs are already pretty good at.

I think DeekThink is something different though. It is able to figure out some things that I know do not have much training data at all. It is looking at the manual and figuring things out. "That doesn't make sense. Wait, that can't be right. I must have the formula wrong." I just seen that in the chain of thought.

Nah, in my experience, if there is the slightest error in the first sentence of the chain of thought, it tends to get worse and worse. I've had prompts that would generate a reasonable response in llama, but turn out utter garbage in Deepthink.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#140

Post by swatcoder »

EarthMephit wrote: post #92
potsandpans wrote: post #10

Counterexample: Ive been able to complete more side projects in the last month leveraging llms than i have ever in my life. One of which I believe to have potential as a viable product, and another which involved complicated rust `no_std` and linker setup for compiling rust code onto bare metal RISCV from scratch. I think the key to being successful here is to realize that you're still at the wheel as an engineer. Th…

I find that LLMs are almost comically bad at projects that have a hardware component like RaspberryPi or Pico, or Ardunio. I think that its because often the libraries you use are niche or have a a few similar versions, the LLM really commonly hallucinated solutions and would continually suggest that library X did have that capability. I think because often in hardware projects you often hit a point where you can't d…

Actually, it's because many of the people writing tutorials and sharing answers about that stuff don't know what the hell they're doing or grasp the fundamentals of how those systems work and so most of the source material the LLM's are trained on is absolute garbage.

Public Arduino, RPi, Pico communities are basically peak cargo cult, with the blind leading the blind through things they don't understand. The noise is vastly louder than the signal.

There's a basically giant chasm between expereinced or professional embedded developers that mostly have no need to ever touch those things or visit their forums, and the confused hobbyists on those forums randomly slapping together code until something sorta works while trying to share their discoveries.

Presumably, those communities and their internal knowledge will mature eventually, but it's taking a long long time and it's still an absolute mess.

If you're genuinely interested in embedded development and IoT stuff, and are willing to put in the time to learn, put those platforms away and challenge yourself to at least learn how to directly work with production-track SoC'a from Nordic or ESP or whatever. And buy some books or take some courses instead of relying on forums or LLM's. You'll find yourself rewarded for the effort.

Post reply on HN