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The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

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Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#131

Post by dncornholio »

dntrshnthngjxct wrote: post #77
tovej wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong. I can type up what I want much faster and be sure it's at least solving the right problem, even if it may have bugs. There are also tools to generate boilerplate that work much much better than LLMs. And they're deterministic.

If you do not plan out the architecture soundly, no amount of prompting will fix it if it is bad. I know this because my "handmade" project made with backward compatibility and horrible architecture keeps being badly fixed by LLM while the ones that rely on preemptive planning of the features and architecture, end up working right.

LLM's keep messing up even on a plain Laravel codebase..

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#132

Post by fzeroracer »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #122
fzeroracer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing Do you ever ask why you're writing the same thing over and over again? That's literally the foundational piece of being an engineer; understanding when you're reinventing the wheel when there's a perfectly good wheel nearby.

When you make a function f(a, b, c) It is reusable only if simply changing a, b, c is enough to give the function that you want. Options object etc _parameterise_ that function. It is useful only if the variability in reuse you desire is spanned by the parameters. This is syntactic reuse. With LLMs, the parameterisation goes into semantic space. This makes code more reusable. A model trained on all of GitHub can reus…

There are two important failures I see with this logic:

First, I am not arguing for reusability. Reusability is one of the most common mistakes you can make as a software engineer because you are over-generalizing what you need before you need it. Code should be written for your specific use case, and only generalized as problems appear. But if you can recognize that your specific use case fits a known problem, then you can find the best way to solve that problem, faster.

Second, when you're using an LLM to make your code more 'reusable' you are taking full responsibility for everything that LLM vomits out. You're no longer assembling a car from well known parts, taking care to tailor it to your use case as needed. You're now building everything in said car, from the tires to the engine and the rearview mirror.

Coding is a constant balance between understanding what you're solving for and what can solve it. Using LLMs takes the worst of both worlds, by offloading both your understanding of the problem and your understanding of the solution.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#133

Post by mr_toad »

simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

> fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions?

Sometimes it has. The amount of generated code that selected count(distinct id) from customers would produce is huge.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#134

Post by Sharlin »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #124
Sharlin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, exactly. And LLM help developers save time from writing the same thing that has be done by other developers for a thousand times. Before LLMs we did already have a way to "save developers time from writing the same thing that has been done by other developers for a thousand times", you know? A LLM doing the same thing the 1001st time is not code reuse. Code reuse is code reuse.

Oh come on, you don't have to be condescending about function calls. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260385

I was talking about libraries, higher-level units of reuse than individual functions. And your "syntactic" vs "semantic" reuse makes zero sense. Functions are literally written and invoked for their semantics – what they make happen. "Syntactic reuse" would be macros if anything, and indeed macros are very good at reducing boilerplate.

You might have a more compelling argument if instead of syntax and semantics you contrasted semantics and pragmatics.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#135

Post by theshrike79 »

wormpilled wrote: post #85
delaminator wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I hate CGI video" "So you hated the TV Series Ugly Betty then?" "What? that's not CGI!" This video is 15 years old https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjorAhcnbY

I think that's a different category, though. Those backgrounds are actual video recordings of real places, not 3D environments modeled from scratch. It looks 'real' because the background actually exists.

It's still 100% CGI compositing and definitely not all of them are real places or real objects.

In that specific 15 year old example they're mostly composited, you're right about that.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#136

Post by mr_toad »

noemit wrote: post #106

Many people don't know this, but the Luddites were right. I studied Art History and this particular movement. One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.) I was able to feel wool scarves made in europe from the middle ages. (In museum storage, under the guidance of a curator) They are a fundamentally diff…

> One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.)

Sounds like a tautology. If you deliberately hoard knowledge of course it’s going to be hard to obtain.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#137

Post by [deleted] »

raincole wrote: post #34

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…

[deleted]

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#138

Post by hermannj314 »

noemit wrote: post #106

Many people don't know this, but the Luddites were right. I studied Art History and this particular movement. One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.) I was able to feel wool scarves made in europe from the middle ages. (In museum storage, under the guidance of a curator) They are a fundamentally diff…

only code anyone will be touching in a museum in 800 years will be the good code. I hope they don't talk about what great craftsmen we all were because someone saw an original Fabrice Bellard at the Louvre.

Survivor bias plays a role in glorifying the past.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#139

Post by KellyCriterion »

keyringlight wrote: post #120
theshrike79 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also "AI" has been in gaming, especially mobile gaming, for a literal decade already. Household name game studios have had custom AI art asset tooling for a long time that can create art quickly, using their specific style. AI is a tool and as Steve Jobs said, you can hold it wrong. It's like plastic surgery, you only notice the bad ones and object to them. An expert might detect the better jobs, but the regular folk…

Another example is upscaled texture mods, which has been a trend for a long while before 'large language' took off as a trend. Mods to improve textures in a game are definitely not new and that probably means including from other sources, but the ability to automate/industrialize that (and presumably a lot of training material available) meant there was a big wave of that mod category a few years back. My impression…

This should be completely crushed by Nano Banana models?

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#140

Post by theshrike79 »

flohofwoe wrote: post #76
theshrike79 wrote: post #11

> This sort of protectionism is also seen in e.g. controlled-appelation foods like artisanal cheese or cured ham. These require not just traditional manufacturing methods and high-quality ingredients from farm to table, but also a specific geographic origin. Maybe "Artisanal Coding" will be a thing in the future?

The 'Handmade Network' is essentially this (in a good way though) - and long before LLMs got good enough for code-generation - instead as a counter philosophy to the soulless "enterprise software development" where a feature that could be implemented in 10 lines of code is wrapped in 1000 lines of "industry-best-practices" boilerplate. Programming via LLMs is just the logical conclusion to this niche of industrialize…

I'm kinda leaning towards the analogy that LLMs are to programming as textile machines were to the loom.

People still pay for hand-knit fabrics (there's one place in Italy that makes silk by hand and it costs 5 figures per foot), but the vast majority is machine made.

Same thing will happen to code, unless the bubble bursts really badly. Most bulk API Glue CRUD stuff and basic web UI work will be mostly automated and churned off automated agentic production lines.

But there will still be a market for that special human touch in code, most likely when you need safety/security or efficiency/speed.

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