ITT: A bunch of people who think they're god's gift to Earth.
The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
131–140 of 295 posts
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#132Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#133I see how cool and powerful they're getting, but agree there is a huge insecurity element in the evangelism. Everyone wants to be seen as the one who will get a seat running the llms when the music stops playing.
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
In your comment replace “LLM” with “Human SWE” and statement will still be correct in vast majority of the situations :)
That's legit true. All code is technical debt. Human SWEs have one saving grace. Sometimes they refactor and reduce some of the debt.
A human SWE can use an LLM to refactor and reduce some of the debt just as easily too. I think fundamentally, the possible rate of new code and new technical debt introduced by LLMs is much higher than a human SWE. Left unchecked, a human still needs sleep and more humans can't be added with more compute.
There's an interesting aspect to the LLM debt being taken on though in that I'm sure some are taking it on now in the bet/hopes that further advancements in LLMs will make it more easily addressable in the future before it is a real problem.
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#135Whatever your personal feeling, judgement, or conviction on this matter; do not dismiss the other side because of a couple wingnuts saying crazy stuff (you can find them on both extremes as well as the middle). Stay curious as to why people have their own conviction, and seek the truth!
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#136What I really like about LLMs is that you can do pair programming without having to deal with humans.
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given how much energy LLMs use, I'd greatly prefer not to let the results speak for themselves.
How many lives would AI have to save for you to say the energy cost is worth it?
I see no point in making this a numbers game. (Like, I was supposed to say "five" or something?)
Let's make it more of a category thing: when AI shows itself responsible for a new category of life-saving technique, like a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's, then I'd have to reconsider.
(And even then, it will be balanced against rising sea levels, extinctions, and other energy use effects.)
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#138[deleted]
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claude Code is way better than I am at rummaging through Git history, handling merge conflicts, renaming things, writing SQL queries whose syntax I always forget (window functions and the like). But yeah. If I give it a big, non-specific task, it generates a lot of mediocre (or worse) code.
That's funny that's all the things I don't trust it to do. I actually use it the other way around, give it a big non-specific task, see if it works, specify better, retry, throw away 60% - 90% of the generated code, fix bugs in a bunch of places and out comes an implemented feature.
Agreed. Claude is horrible at munging git history and can destroy the thing I depend on to fix Claude's messes. I always do my git rebasing by hand.
The first iteration of Claude code is usually a big over-coded mess, but it's pretty good at iterating to clean it up, given proper instruction.
Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
#140[deleted]