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Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

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Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#161

Post by achierius »

bongodongobob wrote: post #96
sodapopcan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As pertaining to software development, I agree. I've been hearing accounting (online and from coworkers) of using LLMs to do deterministic stuff. And yet, instead of at least prompting once to "write a script to do X," they just keep prompting "do X" over and over again. Seems incredibly wasteful. It feels like there is this thought of "We are not making progress if we aren't getting the LLM to do everything. Having…

I am one of these people. For my scripting needs, it would probably take me longer to find the script I saved rather than just asking it again and getting an answer in 15 seconds. I haven't saved a smallish script in a year.

I used to be one of those people, then I started saving these scripts in a folder and realized just how much time it saved me. Especially for nontrivial scripts which require a lot of typing or input specification.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#162

Post by computerex »

achierius wrote: post #156
CuriouslyC wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gotten Claude Code to make CUDA kernels and all kinds of advanced stuff that there's zero percent chance a junior would pull off. AI is like a super advanced senior wearing a blindfold. It knows almost everything, it's super fast, and it gets confused pretty quickly about things after you tell it.

You'd be surprised at what juniors can pull off. I have seen fresh-out-of-college new grads write performant GPU kernels that are used in real world library implementations for particular architectures.

What's your sample size?

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#163

Post by CuriouslyC »

achierius wrote: post #156
CuriouslyC wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gotten Claude Code to make CUDA kernels and all kinds of advanced stuff that there's zero percent chance a junior would pull off. AI is like a super advanced senior wearing a blindfold. It knows almost everything, it's super fast, and it gets confused pretty quickly about things after you tell it.

You'd be surprised at what juniors can pull off. I have seen fresh-out-of-college new grads write performant GPU kernels that are used in real world library implementations for particular architectures.

Most of the juniors I've worked with would make numerical errors and give up/declare premature victory before getting the implementation to a robust state. I'm sure there are exceptional young folks out there though.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#164

Post by achierius »

gnerd00 wrote: post #90
nine_k wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather say that LLMs live in a world that consists entirely of stories, nothing but words and their combinations. Thy have no other reality. So they are good at generating more stories that would sit well with the stories they already know. But the stories are often imprecise, and sometimes contradictory, so they have to guess. Also, LLMs don't know how to count, but they know that two usually follows one, and th…

this was true, but then it wasn't... the research world several years ago, had a moment when the machinery could reliably solve multi-step problems.. there had to be intermediary results; and machinery could solve problems in a domain where they were not trained specifically.. this caused a lot of excitement, and several hundred billion dollars in various investments.. Since no one actually knows how all of it works,…

Are you sure you're talking about LLMs? These sound more like traditional ML systems like AlphaFold or AlphaProof.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#165

Post by daveguy »

archeantus wrote: post #152

If all you’ve done with AI is just use it for autocomplete, you’re missing out big time. I built a slick react app using Lovable yesterday and then created a Node BE using Claude Code today. I told Claude Code to look through the FE code to understand the requirements and purpose of the site, and to build a detailed plan (including proposed DB schemas) for a system that could support that functionality. It generated…

Okay, but LLMs will produce a thousand lines of code for Hello World.

Plus, there is no telling how many bugs you have in that code.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#166

Post by [deleted] »

archeantus wrote: post #152

If all you’ve done with AI is just use it for autocomplete, you’re missing out big time. I built a slick react app using Lovable yesterday and then created a Node BE using Claude Code today. I told Claude Code to look through the FE code to understand the requirements and purpose of the site, and to build a detailed plan (including proposed DB schemas) for a system that could support that functionality. It generated…

[deleted]

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#167

Post by siffland »

The issue is a lot of times it takes a senior level programmer to reason with a LLM to get the results needed. What happens when there are no Juniors to replace the Seniors. I guess by then AI will be able to program efficiently enough.

So far AI seems to be a great augmentation, but not a replacement.

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#168

Post by daveguy »

tptacek wrote: post #19
krainboltgreene wrote: post #3

> All major technological advances have come with economic bubbles, from canals and railroads to the internet. Is this actually correct? I don't see any evidence for a "airflight bubble" or a "car bubble" or a "loom bubble" at the technologies' invention. Also the "canal bubble" wasn't about the technology, it was about the speculation on a series of big canals but we had been making canals for a long time. More impo…

I don't know enough about the early history of the airline industry but there was very definitely a long series of huge bubbles in the railroad industry.

I would be very interested in reading about huge bubbles in railroad, airline, or any other industry. Do you happen to have references (genuinely asking; the original article didn't include any references)?

Edits--

Found one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893

Another good one:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Utility_Holding_Company... (from cake_robot here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45056621)

For reference, apple and spotify links to the Derek Thompson podcast in reply below (thank you!):

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...

https://open.spotify.com/show/3fQkNGzE1mBF1VrxVTY0oo

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#169

Post by tptacek »

daveguy wrote: post #168
tptacek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know enough about the early history of the airline industry but there was very definitely a long series of huge bubbles in the railroad industry.

I would be very interested in reading about huge bubbles in railroad, airline, or any other industry. Do you happen to have references (genuinely asking; the original article didn't include any references)? Edits-- Found one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893 Another good one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Utility_Holding_Company... (from cake_robot here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45056621…

There was just a long Derek Thompson podcast with a Transcontinental Railroad scholar about this! (That's why I knew about it.)

The whole subtext of that podcast was how eerily similar the Transcontinental Railroad was to AI (as an investment/malinvestment/prediction of future trends).

Re: Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

#170

Post by [deleted] »

epolanski wrote: post #114
iLoveOncall wrote: post #38

> One of the big problems with these surveys is that they aren’t taking into account how people are using the LLMs. From what I can tell the vast majority of LLM usage is fancy auto-complete, often using co-pilot. This is a completely wrong assumption and negates a bunch of the points of the article...

How is it wrong? Do you have any hard number and data to state that tab/auto complete are less popular than agentic coding?

[deleted]
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