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The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

lewiscampbell.tech

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Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#151

Post by edfletcher_t137 »

simonw wrote: post #16

"LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers?" No.

Came here to comment on this line: it completely changes the tone of the article. It's fairly reasonable and neutral until we get here, upon which the antagonism is jarringly clear.

In fact I would posit this is the central crux of the post: OP does not believe those LLM evangelists were ever good programmers.

As others have already noted[1], many well-known excellent programmers - including yourself! and now even Linus! - would beg to differ.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610143

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#152

Post by zahlman »

wild_egg wrote: post #54
simonw wrote: post #16

"LLM evangelists - are you willing to admit that you just might not be that good at programming computers?" No.

I do wonder if C programmers ever asked that of Python devs back in the day.

Back in the day, Python devs commonly were C programmers.

Someone had to do the implementation, after all. And the C API was (and still is) kind of a big deal.

There's a reason the standard library is full of direct ports of C libraries with unsightly, highly un-Pythonic names and APIs. (Of course, it's also full of direct ports of Java libraries with unsightly, highly un-Pythonic architecture.)

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#153

Post by falloutx »

accrual wrote: post #6

I see it only as a threat to those who have a deep hook into their role as a SWE. If as a SWE you see the oncoming change and adapt to it, no issue. If as a SWE you see the enablement of LLMs as an existential threat, then you will find many issues, and you will fail to adapt and have all kind of issues related to it.

If a company wants to cut a lot of SWE it wouldn't matter if you have adapted or not, they will just cut as much as they can. How can you adapt more than another SWE? These tools seem easy to learn and there isn't a massive learning curve if you're a programmer. I wonder if changing to a different role would work but I would be skeptical, because after SWEs they will try to cut the other jobs and if there is no one at the bottom, middle management doesn't make sense.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#154

Post by blibble »

duendefm wrote: post #39
Turskarama wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen people say something along these lines what feels like every month for the past year.

It's different this time. You can see that at the same time, they are finally, definitely solving hard mathematical problems. They passed the phase of just being like good search engines to being actual generators of new data from their generalizations. I can give you a simple example. Any code they generated before brought frustration and they would loop with feedback. Now they actually produce "human level" code.

> It's different this time.

they said this every time too

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#155

Post by falloutx »

ymyms wrote: post #24
budududuroiu wrote: post #2

I somewhat agree with this poster. However, I think the unfortunate reality of programming for money is that a mediocre programmer that pumps out millions of lines of slop that seems to drive the business forward and manages to hide disastrous bugs until after the contract / promotion cycle is over will get further ahead than the more competent programmer that delivers better, less buggy, less spaghetti code.

I mean, isn't driving the business forward really what matters (outside of academia, open source, and other such endeavors). We live in a hyper competitive market. All else being equal, if company A can produce "millions of lines of slop", constantly living on the knife-edge of disaster but not falling over it, they will beat company B that artificially slows themselves down. Up until the point company A implodes, bu…

This is not reality for most companies. Some have billions in bank but still produce slop. Its because their internal systems rewards slop.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#156

Post by mkroman »

visarga wrote: post #148
throwawayffffas wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM generated code is technical debt. If you are still working on the codebase the next day it will bite you. It might be as simple as an inconvenient interface, a bunch of duplicated functions that could just be imported, but eventually you are going to have to pay it.

Untested undocumented LLM code is technical debt, but if you do specs and tests it's actually the opposite, you can go beyond technical debt and regenerate your code as you like. You just need testing to be so good it guarantees the behavior you care about, and that is easier in our age of AI coding agents.

> but if you do specs and tests it's actually the opposite, you can go beyond technical debt and regenerate your code as you like.

Having to write all the specs and tests just right so you can regenerate the code until you get the desired output just sounds like an expensive version of the infinite monkey theorem, but with LLMs instead of monkeys.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#157

Post by rytill »

rudedogg wrote: post #3

Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…

LLMs are not "average text generation machines" once they have context. LLMs learn a distribution.

The moment you start the prompt with "You are an interactive CLI tool that helps users with software engineering at the level of a veteran expert" you have biased the LLM such that the tokens it produces are from a very non-average part of the distribution it's modeling.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#158

Post by InfamousRece »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #87
j2kun wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author claims it's not just that one evangelizes it, but that they become hostile when someone claims to not have the same experience in response. I don't recall Either Willison or Antirez scaring people by saying they will be left behind or that they are just afraid of becoming irrelevant. Instead they just talk about their positive experiences using it. Willison and Antirez seem to be fine to live and let live…

Thanks for clarifying for people. And yeah, as I laid out in the article (that of course, very few people actually read, even though it was short...), I really don't mind how people make code. It's those that try so hard to convince the rest of us I find very suspect.

In my case I don’t even mind if these evangelists try so hard to convince other developers. What I do mind is that they seem to be quite successful in convincing our bosses. So we get things like mandatory LLM usage, minimum number of Claude API calls per day, every commit must be co-authored by Claude, etc.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#159

Post by lijok »

WolfeReader wrote: post #137
lijok wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

> 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.

We’re way past that

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#160

Post by SchemaLoad »

ymyms wrote: post #38
j2kun wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author claims it's not just that one evangelizes it, but that they become hostile when someone claims to not have the same experience in response. I don't recall Either Willison or Antirez scaring people by saying they will be left behind or that they are just afraid of becoming irrelevant. Instead they just talk about their positive experiences using it. Willison and Antirez seem to be fine to live and let live…

My gut says that is not a property of LLM evangelists, but a property of current internet culture in general. People with strong, divisive, and engaging opinions seem to do well (by some definition of well) online.

It's weird how some people seem to treat using an LLM as part of their personality in a borderline cult like way. So someone saying they don't use it or don't find it useful triggers an anger response in them.
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