161–170 of 221 posts
On the plus side it’s easier than ever to patch or fork projects. So at least this toxic gatekeeping behavior matters less than it used to.
The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…
> The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. There was nothing stopping them from making software before... Over the past ~15 years, the amount of resources to learn programming, and to make the whole process approa…
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…
> 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…
> Does open source matter anymore? I mean, did it ever? It depends what you mean. Very few open source or free software projects are successful in any meaningful sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 funct…
To be fair, there are plenty of situations where throwaway code is perfectly fine and/or defect risks are low enough to make the trade-off worth it. I don't think a lot of developers are thinking about it in that context, though.
(No unit tests aren't enough)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Developing a functional app that meets your needs with an LLM takes it's own kind of skill, and is substantially more difficult if you can't recognize when the machine is steering your architecture in the wrong direction. It takes actual, real work. It's certainly a completely different kind of work than writing most of the code yourself, but so is using Java when compared to hand writing x86 opcodes. Prompting an LL…
I'm not saying people can't have fun , I'm saying it's a misplaced sense of pride that gives me the ick when I sense it in others. I see plenty of people who readily disclose that their thing they "built" was just slopped together by an LLM and this is perfectly okay, because they aren't trying to take credit for accomplishments that they didn't put in the expected effort for. The difference between the skill & effor…
There are way more nuanced uses of LLMs than skill-free “write me a facebook clone.” Like, hey LLM, help me develop tests of X, review this design for X, help me articulate what is wrong with the code for X, give me ideas for simplifying X, suggest optimizations for X, help me debug this failure trace for X, help me apply this refactor across all of X, and on and on. Even these are stupid examples that way over simplify.
I’m super proud of the work I’ve created /alongside/ LLMs. I’ll let it build me development aides and such with little oversight and there’s no skill there. But you can use it deliberately and maintain control, and it’s amazing to have a tool that can look through your code with you from so many angles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 funct…
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…
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…
As a systems engineer, ive been a reverse centaur more often than not. I have a Jira queue. It drives what work I do. I may have some leeway in how I do the work, and what tickets I pull, but Im absolutely at the behest of the ticketing behemoth. Tickets have been my life since I started helpdesk. And future roles will also be ticketed. And they almost all are customer-facing or system-breakage (which impacts lots of…
Reverse centaur means a machine is using you to get things done. Presumably at the other end of the ticketing system is other people. So not really the same thing at all.
We can now observe a complete reverse centaur. But those of us who go ticket after ticket, metrics of tickets, response times, and all of those management metrics also go directly to reverse centaurs as well.
Now, its not Marshall Brain's "Story of Manna" level each listed action at a time... But it was definitely getting to that point.
Call centers were already absolutely at that point, with completely scripted communications, that that attendant could not deviate from or be fired.
> Presumably at the other end of the ticketing system is other people.
Sometimes. As a systems engineer, tickets can also be generated by other systems as an "immune response" to detected but unfixable errors.
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…
Because I don't trust myself to review a giant PR. It takes too much cognition to properly review it.
And now that people are making PRs with AI, this is even more important. If the AI was good enough to have coded it, please instruct it to make the changes in reviewable chunks.