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I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

nemo.foo

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Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#191

Post by BalinKing »

maybesomaybenot wrote: post #177
BalinKing wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Claude is like having my own college professor. I don't use Claude, so maybe there's a huge gap in reliability between it and ChatGPT 4o. But with that disclaimer out of the way, I'm always fairly confused when people report experiences like these—IME, LLMs fall over miserably at even very simple pure math questions. Grammatical breakdowns of sentences (for a major language like Japanese) are also very hit-or-miss.…

I think a lot of these people object to AI probably see the gross amounts of energy it is using, or the trillions of dollars going to fewer than half a dozen men (most american, mostly white). But, once you've had AI help you solve some gnarly problems, it is hard not to be amazed. And this is coming from a gal who thinks the idea of self-driving cars is the biggest waste of resources ever.

(EDIT: Upon rereading this, it feels unintentionally blunt. I'm not trying to argue, and I apologize if my tone is somewhat unfriendly—that's purely a reflection of the fact that I'm a bad writer!)

Sorry, maybe I should've been clearer in my response—I specifically disagree with the "college professor" comparison. That is to say, in the areas I've tried using them for, LLM's can't even help me solve simple problems, let alone gnarly ones. Which is why hearing about experiences like yours leaves me genuinely confused.

I do get your point about people disagreeing with modern AI for "political" reasons, but I think it's inaccurate to lump everyone into that bucket. I, for one, am not trying to make any broader political statements or anything—I just genuinely can't see how LLMs are as practically useful as other people claim, outside of specific use cases.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#192

Post by tashian »

masklinn wrote: post #178
tashian wrote: post #114

I used Claude to help me build a side project in 4 hours that I would never have built otherwise. Essentially, it's a morphing wavetable oscillator in React ( https://waves.tashian.com ). Six months ago, I tried building this app with ChatGPT and got nowhere fast. Building it with Claude required a gluing together a few things that I didn't know much about: JavaScript audio processing, drawing on a JavaScript canvas,…

What was your workflow for doing that? Just going back and forth in a chat, or a more integrated experience in a dedicated editor?

Just copy/paste from the chat window. I kept running into token limits. I came away from it wanting a much better workflow.

That's the next step for me in learning AI... playing with different integrated editor tools.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#193

Post by tasuki »

KronisLV wrote: post #16

In my experience LLMs will help you with things that have been solved thousands of times before and are just a matter of finding some easily researched solution. The very moment when you try to go off the beaten path and do something unconventional or stuff that most people won't have written a lot about, it gets more tricky. Just consider how many people will know how to configure some middleware in a Node.js projec…

LLMs are surprisingly good at Haskell (and I'm not).

I hope for a rennaisance of somewhat more rigorous programming languages: you can typecheck the LLM suggestions to see if they're any good. Also you can feed the type errors back to the LLM.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#194

Post by petercooper »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #55
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> vs most things related to hardware or low level work. counter point: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/pull/11453 > This PR provides a big jump in speed for WASM by leveraging SIMD instructions for qX_K_q8_K and qX_0_q8_0 dot product functions. > Surprisingly, 99% of the code in this PR is written by DeekSeek-R1. The only thing I do is to develop tests and write prompts (with some trials and errors)

at a certain point though, one wonders if you can trust people to accurately report how much is written by an LLM. (not even implying bad faith, but if you're constantly re-reading, selecting and re-combining snippets written by LLMs, it's not really "written" by LLMs in the same way that's implied).

We kinda went through this with images when Photoshop and similar tools appeared. I remember a lot of people asking questions in the late 90s/early 00s in particular about if an image were “real” or not and the distinctions between smart photography and digital compositions. Nowadays we just assume everyone is using such tools as a baseline and genuinely clever photography is now celebrated as an exception. Perhaps ditto with CGI and prop/set making in movies. Unless a director crows about how genuine the effects are, we assume CGI.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#195

Post by djray »

The OP misunderstands (perhaps deliberately or for humorous effect) what a co-pilot is. This is telling:

"I learned that I need to stay firmly in the driver’s seat when tackling new tech."

Er, that's pretty much what a pilot is supposed to do! You can't (as yet) just give an AI free reign over your codebase and expect to come back later that day to discover a fully finished implementation. Maybe unless your prompt was "Make a snake game in Python". A pilot would be supervising their co-pilot at all times.

Comparing AIs to junior devs is getting tiresome. AIs like Claude and newer versions of ChatGPT have incredible knowledge bases. Yes, they do slip up, especially with esoteric matters where there are few authoritative (or several conflicting) sources, but the breadth of knowledge in and of itself is very valuable. As an anecdote, neither Claude nor ChatGPT were able to accurately answer a question I had about file operation flags yesterday, but when I said to ChatGPT that its answer wasn't correct, it apologised and said the Raymond Chen article it had sourced wasn't super clear about the particular combination I'd asked about. That's like having your own research assistant, not a headstrong overconfident junior dev. Yes, they make mistakes, but at least now they'll admit to them. This is a long way from a year or two ago.

In conclusion: don't use an AI as one of your primary sources of information for technology you're new to, especially if you're not double-checking its answers like a good pilot.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#196

Post by codr7 »

piva00 wrote: post #25
codr7 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're doing is sacrificing learning for speed. Which is fine, if it's a conscious choice for yourself.

I don't think GP was talking about themselves being a junior using LLMs, at least my interpretation was that devs should learn how to leverage misguided junior, and LLMs are more-or-less on the level of a misguided junior. Which I completely agree, I use LLMs for the cases where I do know what I'm trying to do, I just can't remember some exact detail that would require reading documentation. It's much quicker to leve…

And the end result is you won't learn the details, so you will become more and more dependent on your magic piano.

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#198

Post by almostdeadguy »

janderson215 wrote: post #173
biohcacker84 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That matches my experience too. I wonder how fast they'll improve and if LLMs will hit a wall, as some AI experts think.

Is it possible that you’re both using LLMs the same way you’d use SO and that’s the reason you see such similarities? The reason I ask is because it doesn’t not match my experience. It feels more like I’m able to Matrix-upload docs into my brain like Trinity learning to fly a helicopter.

I'm sorry, what?

Re: I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project

#200

Post by piva00 »

codr7 wrote: post #196
piva00 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think GP was talking about themselves being a junior using LLMs, at least my interpretation was that devs should learn how to leverage misguided junior, and LLMs are more-or-less on the level of a misguided junior. Which I completely agree, I use LLMs for the cases where I do know what I'm trying to do, I just can't remember some exact detail that would require reading documentation. It's much quicker to leve…

And the end result is you won't learn the details, so you will become more and more dependent on your magic piano.

I know the details, I've been through the wading, thrashing around the docs, the books, I just can't recall the right incantation at that moment and a LLM is more efficient than searching the web.

I still have the skills to search the web if the magic piano disappears.

Don't know why you are trying to come up with a situation that doesn't exist, what's your point exactly against this quite narrow use-case?

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