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Various LLM Smells

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Re: Various LLM Smells

#141

Post by unshavedyak »

spiffistan wrote: post #138
spdustin wrote: post #18

- “(The) honest caveat:” (or “genuine caveat:”, both with the colon) - “(The) honest answer:” (again, with colon) - “The thing to internalize:” - “The smoking gun:” (really, sentences that start with “The :” are a strong tell, but those four are the most prolific) - “load bearing” (when not talking about architecture) - “blast radius” (when not talking about actual explosives, but rather the effect of an event/action…

These seem mostly like Claudeisms. I feel each model (and even generation) has their own set of these isms.

Which seems logical - if they were somehow consistent between all LLMs i'd be even more curious how LLMs are... crab-evolving to 'isms, but hopefully that's not the case hah. (i say crab-evolving in jest)

Re: Various LLM Smells

#142

Post by cheesecompiler »

spdustin wrote: post #18

- “(The) honest caveat:” (or “genuine caveat:”, both with the colon) - “(The) honest answer:” (again, with colon) - “The thing to internalize:” - “The smoking gun:” (really, sentences that start with “The :” are a strong tell, but those four are the most prolific) - “load bearing” (when not talking about architecture) - “blast radius” (when not talking about actual explosives, but rather the effect of an event/action…

I hear "Substrate" a LOT.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#143

Post by tom_ »

Barbing wrote: post #46
thewebguyd wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would argue about the actual frequency of their use Assuming you mean load bearing & blast radius, I'd see those used and use them myself very frequently pre LLM, mostly in online discussions though so its telling where they got their training data. Load bearing itself is/was a pretty normal phrase in the ops world in daily discussion. Smoke test though, I can't say I've ever see irl usage.

Heard smoke test IRL & was confused to see it used indeed in place of “sanity check”. Weird.

Can't remember when I first heard it, but I searched my email and got a pile of results from 2012 and 2009. It's possible there's earlier in there somewhere but 2009 was a busy year so I got bored of clicking the "more results" button...

Re: Various LLM Smells

#144

Post by tomrod »

Moar! I want all the smells!

/endredditmode

I actually love folks documenting this. I'm all for LLMs producing rough drafts. But rough drafts are, as a rule, slop.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#145

Post by dvt »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #124
dvt wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, it's more like saying "I judge an artist on my terms regardless of how well they sell on the market". I feel like I need to push back here, because some of the best programmers around: Carmack, Torvalds, Johnathan Blow, even folks that make programming languages like K&R, Rob Pike, etc. are judged on their respective end products, not on minutia found in code reviews. For example, if I asked you "why do you thi…

You're contradicting yourself. First you say that they're judged on the end product, then you mention things that are very clearly not end products but thoughts and visions behind them that only lead to end products. Frankly, I have no real idea of how good Carmack, Torvalds or Blow are as programmers, I have never worked with them so I don't really have a way to tell (even though I do contribute to Linux and I've se…

> You're contradicting yourself

How?

> you mention things that are very clearly not end products but thoughts and visions behind them that only lead to end products

Thoughts and visions are much more closely intertwined with end products (in fact, likely supercede them) than some random code review is, so I'm not seeing where the contradiction lies.

> that's the main thing he was being judged on for decades now

Linus hasn't written any code[1] in at least half a decade+. To argue that he's being judged on his code misunderstands why Linux became so popular to begin with.

[1] https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/07/03/2133201/linus-torv...

Re: Various LLM Smells

#146

Post by mrob »

cortesoft wrote: post #110
Planktonne wrote: post #8

> The LLM generated writing obviously felt significantly better than my own writing. A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. What that means is that if you find yourself thinking of its output as significantly better than yours in a particular domain, there's a high chance that you are not equipped to judge that quality effectively.

So what does this mean in practice, though? Let's say you are correct. You ask an LLM to write something for you, and to you it looks really, really good. So based on your conjecture, that means I am not a very good writer. Ok, but how does that change what I should do? If I am not a very good writer, that means an LLM IS actually better than me, even if it might not be objectively good to an expert writer. My two ch…

>If I am not a very good writer, that means an LLM IS actually better than me

If you're not a very good writer, I'll at least skim your work to see if it contains any good ideas. If it's slop, I'll just close the tab. You already told me it's not worth caring about, so I'll agree with your decision.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#147

Post by avador »

fcarraldo wrote: post #137
avador wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Human Thought” another way of saying that “feedback has an effect”? If so, this seems to be a trivial (still worthy) assertion. For example, I intend to, say, construct a shed. I make mistakes that I only see because I actually constructed. I revise future endeavours involving sheds. I admit to not having read this piece, and am merely reacting to the title. —- Okay, I…

Do you think the first paragraph is enough of a basis to form an opinion from?

Not normally, no. Can you point to a divergence of the bitterness in the subsequent text?

What I find to be the normal pattern (by intuition) is that the condensed leading text belies the expansive following text. This is likely lazy (a shortcut) and I am open to correction at your effort. If a call to your effort (I apologize) is unpalatable then I concede.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#149

Post by saghm »

bitwize wrote: post #105
ryandrake wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. This is true for coding, too, which I think, to a large degree, might explain the polarized differences in opinions on HN about the quality of LLM-produced code. You have the 1. "AI produces code better than I could possibly write, one shots things it would take me days to do, and has made me 10X more productive!" camp, and you have…

Eric S. Raymond has basically stopped writing code by hand altogether. He consistently delivers high quality code without intervening to fix the LLM's output himself, much faster than he would have been able to alone. This is very bad news for camp 2 because it means one of three things: 1) he is extraordinarily lucky 2) he is extraordinary brilliant at manipulating LLMs 3) you really are "holding it wrong" and you a…

I'm very confused by this logic. Why should I care about his output compared to what I observe from the larger group if he's not an outlier, and if he is an outlier, why would the second one be unlikely? The only way I can make sense of this is if you're claiming that he's both an exceptional coder and that skill in coding by hand is completely uncorrelated to skill in using LLMs to code, and it's not clear to me why that would be more likely than either or both of those being false.

Re: Various LLM Smells

#150

Post by [deleted] »

bitwize wrote: post #105
ryandrake wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. This is true for coding, too, which I think, to a large degree, might explain the polarized differences in opinions on HN about the quality of LLM-produced code. You have the 1. "AI produces code better than I could possibly write, one shots things it would take me days to do, and has made me 10X more productive!" camp, and you have…

Eric S. Raymond has basically stopped writing code by hand altogether. He consistently delivers high quality code without intervening to fix the LLM's output himself, much faster than he would have been able to alone. This is very bad news for camp 2 because it means one of three things: 1) he is extraordinarily lucky 2) he is extraordinary brilliant at manipulating LLMs 3) you really are "holding it wrong" and you a…

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