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I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

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Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#151

Post by seanlinehan »

slopinthebag wrote: post #108
seanlinehan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can reason by analogy here. In a pre-LLM world, a classic software team would have PMs, designers, and engineers. Of those three, the PM wouldn't have any real role in writing code. And they would rarely contribute a ton to the design. What they would be contributing is ideas, market insights, coordination, prioritization, etc. When the product ships, one would expect the PM to feel a real sense of accomplishment…

It's more akin to someone commissioning a piece of art, where they describe the piece in varying detail and then it's the responsibility of the artist to see it through, perhaps deciphering ambiguities in the p̴r̴o̴m̴p̴t̴ commission brief. If you want to stick with the PM analogy, it would be akin to the manager spending 30 minutes writing up a draft spec, passing it off to their employees and then spending the rest…

I think that's fair for certain one-shot generations. For example, sending off a single prompt to an image or music generator and just accepting the output.

But I think most of this stuff is iterative, multi-turn. You type a thing in, see what comes back, and then repeat until you have something that satisfies your desire.

Taking the manager analogy. If you spent 30-minutes writing up a draft spec, waited for the outputs, had a review meeting where you provided good feedback, and then repeated that cycle until the product was done... Again, I think that manager (assuming, of course, that their feedback was useful) should feel some pride in shaping that output!

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#152

Post by XorNot »

toponijo wrote: post #82
aidenn0 wrote: post #60

I first encountered the following concept in one of Oxide's publications; good chance it didn't originate there though: There is an implicit social contract with writing that the writer has put more effort into writing than the reader will need to read something. Sure you get crackpots still, but there are only so many Gene Rays in this world, so the volume is limited. I think the same applies to PRs. Pre-AI , it was…

Given this, you can conclude that writers should be putting in at least at much effort as readers, whether or not they use an LLM. What really seems to be the problem is writers that don't at least check their own work, and pass that burden onto the readers. This is easier than ever with LLMs. This is toxic behavior that unfortunately rewards a selfish writer. I'm worried the AI push incentivizes this too much, to wh…

Isn't this just a continuation of the performance art of the modern corporate environment though? There's an entire industry producing pages of documents which aren't read, aren't responded to, but need to be at least X lines long for anyone to take them "seriously".

Then suddenly LLMs happened and it's like the mask is off: no one's reading them still, but also no one is writing them either.

Which is perhaps a drop in the ocean of the insanity which is "we need you to work on the Jira tasks" as basically a job title.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#153

Post by ErroneousBosh »

aidenn0 wrote: post #60

I first encountered the following concept in one of Oxide's publications; good chance it didn't originate there though: There is an implicit social contract with writing that the writer has put more effort into writing than the reader will need to read something. Sure you get crackpots still, but there are only so many Gene Rays in this world, so the volume is limited. I think the same applies to PRs. Pre-AI , it was…

> Sure you get crackpots still,

They've still put more effort into writing their crackpottery than you will put into reading it, and at worst it's entertaining. The late Ivor Catt's articles on "the death of electric current" - where he expounds the idea that current and indeed electric charge does not exist, because of stuff involving Maxwell's equations where the maths looks about right to me but I'm not a good enough mathematician to prove - were pretty damn odd, but his writing in 1989 on how it would be vital for an interconnected network of computers for information sharing to treat censorship as damage and route around it and some ideas for doing this was bang on the money (as we now see) and his writings on how American business management methods result in the worst possible outcome for everyone that's not already a billionaire have also proven oddly prophetic.

So maybe there's something in the crackpots after all.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#154

Post by skybrian »

surgical_fire wrote: post #133
skybrian wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this makes sense for apps, but the apps will still need infrastructure and common protocols to interoperate. It still won’t make sense to implement your own cryptography.

Why not? If you can vibecode your app, you can vibecode your cryptography as well. You may object to it but that, too, would be elitism. And the person vibecoding has no idea why proper cryptography matters anyway. Or why proper anything matters. This is the ultimate realization of "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge". I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.

Because doing enough security reviews to remove all the security bugs gets expensive, and if you use well-reviewed code, it's already been done.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#155

Post by ErroneousBosh »

gedy wrote: post #131
kentm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its exactly this. I have had a few LLM coding sessions where I reviewed the resulting work and thought "I don't think my team can safely PR this." I then went back and broke it down into smaller PRs, still using LLMs but at a size that is easy to review. And I reviewed the output myself before I asked a reviewer to commit their time. The problem is that this is increasingly seen as a non-productive workflow slowing e…

> I suppose those advocates have more faith in LLM output compared to humans than I do. Some of this is the funny situation where the faithful will state: "This writes better code than I do!" and miss the irony of: "yes, yes it does"

> "This writes better code than I do!" and miss the irony of: "yes, yes it does"

I guess it depends on what you consider "better". I've tried using LLMs to write code over the past couple of weeks with extremely mixed results.

The LLM certainly writes more interesting code! They like their cute ASCII/unicode animations, don't they?

It definitely writes a lot more code, none of it actually correct but some of it functionally similar to correct code.

If you like lots of code then I guess that's better. I like less code.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#156

Post by aidenn0 »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #153
aidenn0 wrote: post #60

I first encountered the following concept in one of Oxide's publications; good chance it didn't originate there though: There is an implicit social contract with writing that the writer has put more effort into writing than the reader will need to read something. Sure you get crackpots still, but there are only so many Gene Rays in this world, so the volume is limited. I think the same applies to PRs. Pre-AI , it was…

> Sure you get crackpots still, They've still put more effort into writing their crackpottery than you will put into reading it, and at worst it's entertaining. The late Ivor Catt's articles on "the death of electric current" - where he expounds the idea that current and indeed electric charge does not exist, because of stuff involving Maxwell's equations where the maths looks about right to me but I'm not a good eno…

Maybe lots of (most?) people are crackpots about something, but they lack the time and/or resolve to do something about it.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#157

Post by majormajor »

kentm wrote: post #104
toponijo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given this, you can conclude that writers should be putting in at least at much effort as readers, whether or not they use an LLM. What really seems to be the problem is writers that don't at least check their own work, and pass that burden onto the readers. This is easier than ever with LLMs. This is toxic behavior that unfortunately rewards a selfish writer. I'm worried the AI push incentivizes this too much, to wh…

Its exactly this. I have had a few LLM coding sessions where I reviewed the resulting work and thought "I don't think my team can safely PR this." I then went back and broke it down into smaller PRs, still using LLMs but at a size that is easy to review. And I reviewed the output myself before I asked a reviewer to commit their time. The problem is that this is increasingly seen as a non-productive workflow slowing e…

> the pressure is growing for writers to just shove massive PRs out the door and reviewers to use LLMs to make that tractable

Even in these move-fast envs, it should be reasonably apparent for people to realize that the author should be using the LLM to make the PR tractable, not solely using the LLM to shovel out a giant PR + slop PR description.

And the LLMs can often do this - if you ask to restructure or break up a big change differently, they can often make quite reasonable suggestions and help with it. That's just not what you're gonna get if you're lazy. If you want a small LLM-generated change, often you have to start with a big one then ask it to figure out what it can get rid of, since many times it doesn't have perfect model of all the code in it's "head" before it starts spitting stuff out. The big companies have been doing their best to automate this for the last couple of years vs the even-more-blind attempts you used to get, but there's still the issue of the models+tools following generic advice aimed at median codebases vs being intimately familiar with this codebase.

You can go fast without being lazy. And when going fast, in some ways, it's more important than ever to put in that effort to not blowing things up.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#159

Post by RealityVoid »

toponijo wrote: post #82
aidenn0 wrote: post #60

I first encountered the following concept in one of Oxide's publications; good chance it didn't originate there though: There is an implicit social contract with writing that the writer has put more effort into writing than the reader will need to read something. Sure you get crackpots still, but there are only so many Gene Rays in this world, so the volume is limited. I think the same applies to PRs. Pre-AI , it was…

Given this, you can conclude that writers should be putting in at least at much effort as readers, whether or not they use an LLM. What really seems to be the problem is writers that don't at least check their own work, and pass that burden onto the readers. This is easier than ever with LLMs. This is toxic behavior that unfortunately rewards a selfish writer. I'm worried the AI push incentivizes this too much, to wh…

I've had a guy once reply in an email with a bug report generated by ChatGPT telling me that some piece of software I wrote wasn't working. He just plopped right there the discussion he had with the confirmation bias machine confirming 100% that what he had in front was sending spurious messages. With all the information in the world at its disposal, the LLM did not consider informing the reporter that maybe his code should flush the serial device pipe before starting his processing. I stopped short from facetiously replying to him that maybe he should use another model, since his seems to be broken.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#160

Post by ahartmetz »

tough wrote: post #144
lelanthran wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TBH I never contributed to Open Source because of the effort needed to bring my PR from "works on my machine" to "compliant with the rest of codebase". Especially that I only want to implement one small thing. That's a good thing; OSS projects don't want drive-by contributors, they want a community. A small bit of friction is a good thing. After all, we can see what happens with frictionless contributions.

I some times will open a PR even if i know it will get closed, simply by because if its a bugfix or feature i want, someone else might do so too, and i have many times adopted code from PR's that were never adopted by mainstream or closed. By pushing that PR, i might be annoying a grouchy maintainer, but at the same time helping tens or hundreds of other users of the software. Imho the beauty of open source is as lon…

If you already know it's not good enough, you can just say so by calling it a proof of concept or hack to demonstrate what needs to be done. Such code is often very useful when writing the real fix.
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