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Let's talk about LLMs

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Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#191

Post by gerdesj »

aspenmartin wrote: post #99
gerdesj wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"paradigm shift" A paradigm shift is an earth shattering, very important change - a complete change in thinking etc. LLMs are not that. They are simply some pretty new tools. Nice tools but they will whip off your metaphorical thumb just as quickly as a miss-used table saw. You'll note that you mention "engineers are offloading": that's not a paradigm shift. That's a bunch of engineers discovering a better slide rule…

I would argue LLMs are possibly the largest paradigm shift the world has ever seen, and we are only at the beginning. The entire scaffolding and structure of programming is in the process of changing — coding has moved to orchestration and testing and governance of how to manage and productionalize code that has surpassed the capacity of human review. If this sounds melodramatic it’s likely that it hasn’t fully taken…

"I would argue LLMs are possibly the largest paradigm shift the world has ever seen"

LLMs are next token guessers with knobs on. That is not a paradigm shift.

Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#192

Post by spopejoy »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #190
spopejoy wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- The DORA report is about organizations not individuals - Mythical man-month is about organizations not individuals - No Silver Bullet: "I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation." Clearly he's NOT talking about the 10x dev building the whole thing themselves,…

Meh, I'll concede that Fred Brooks was mostly writing about developing software within an organisation, and therefore writing about teams. Coding time is important if it gates experiments and spikes. If you have to work out your architecture on paper because actually coding it up is a serious expense, then it becomes harder to experiment with different designs. In an LLM world where coding time is very cheap, it beco…

I guess it's what you think the work of sw dev is.

> Developing an entire architecture and then abandoning it because it turned out that it didn't scale too well, or couldn't handle some edge cases, is not a major mistake or problem any more.

Cool, but I can count on one (two?) hands how many times in a 30yr career I had the opportunity to do this, except when I "made the opportunity" by coding the solution fast enough that the PHBs couldn't say no. LLMs should be even better for this of course.

But it's rare, and those times I forced the issue were good for my career but not always for the team. Most of the time, once an organization has a working product, you want to stay in the lanes, roughly, of that product, which is IMO where the coding time advantage vanishes.

Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#193

Post by nothinkjustai »

aspenmartin wrote: post #183
nothinkjustai wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d say the internet did, since it literally connected people across the globe in real time, which actually provided the technology that allows LLMs and other similar tech to exist in the first place. I think it’s pretty clear the internet has had 10x the impact of LLMs so far. Maybe 100x

The internet has been around since the 80s…ChatGPT came out 4 years ago. The internet took decades to build out the infrastructure. Inflation adjusted capex for AI infrastructure already far surpasses that of the internet. You’re talking about a technology that doesn’t just make things easier it replaces entire swaths of work. Under some weird measurement you may be right but I mean cmon.

You are actually nuts

Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#194

Post by handoflixue »

nothinkjustai wrote: post #193
aspenmartin wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet has been around since the 80s…ChatGPT came out 4 years ago. The internet took decades to build out the infrastructure. Inflation adjusted capex for AI infrastructure already far surpasses that of the internet. You’re talking about a technology that doesn’t just make things easier it replaces entire swaths of work. Under some weird measurement you may be right but I mean cmon.

You are actually nuts

It's wild how unfamiliar you are with the history of the internet - ARPANET was like 1969. Even if we go with AOL in 1985, "decades" to build out the infrastructure is still a very reasonable declaration.

Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#195

Post by handoflixue »

wavemode wrote: post #188
handoflixue wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I quoted multiple passages and established why I think your logic is flawed. If you're convinced by bad logic, so be it.

If you read my entire comment and thought that showing me a benchmark chart remotely addresses the point I'm making, well... I don't know what to tell you.

It's such a shame that you lack any ability to clarify your point - I guess it really wasn't a very good one. I'm not sure why you keep trying to convince me simply by telling me I'm wrong, without providing any information or counter-arguments?

Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#196

Post by aspenmartin »

gerdesj wrote: post #191
aspenmartin wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue LLMs are possibly the largest paradigm shift the world has ever seen, and we are only at the beginning. The entire scaffolding and structure of programming is in the process of changing — coding has moved to orchestration and testing and governance of how to manage and productionalize code that has surpassed the capacity of human review. If this sounds melodramatic it’s likely that it hasn’t fully taken…

"I would argue LLMs are possibly the largest paradigm shift the world has ever seen" LLMs are next token guessers with knobs on. That is not a paradigm shift.

Turns out it is. Trillions of dollars of capex, hundreds of billions of dollars in attributable revenue speak a little louder than a very old and lazy refrain.

Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#197

Post by aspenmartin »

nothinkjustai wrote: post #193
aspenmartin wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet has been around since the 80s…ChatGPT came out 4 years ago. The internet took decades to build out the infrastructure. Inflation adjusted capex for AI infrastructure already far surpasses that of the internet. You’re talking about a technology that doesn’t just make things easier it replaces entire swaths of work. Under some weird measurement you may be right but I mean cmon.

You are actually nuts

If you don’t have anything to refute you don’t have to reply with an insult, it’s not a great look. Feels like you’ve run out of meaningful things to say? Maybe you disagree with something substantive? We’ll never know!

Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#198

Post by yellowapple »

tptacek wrote: post #101
threecheese wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d think any company big enough or working in certain markets which has a Compliance Officer cares about this; regulations are a legitimate business risk, and software integration contracts have security control compliance requirements which very much impact the sdlc. Would you have the same reaction to requiring an approval for a production deployment? That’s driving the development process. —- Also jfc I need to c…

SOC2 is generally regarded as a joke and has in fact almost nothing to do with software resilience even on its own terms.

A joke or not, a lot of organizations take SOC compliance and auditing seriously. Responding to someone requiring it with “who cares, the accountants doing the audits don't know anything anyway” is unlikely to go well.

Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#199

Post by tptacek »

yellowapple wrote: post #198
tptacek wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SOC2 is generally regarded as a joke and has in fact almost nothing to do with software resilience even on its own terms.

A joke or not, a lot of organizations take SOC compliance and auditing seriously. Responding to someone requiring it with “who cares, the accountants doing the audits don't know anything anyway” is unlikely to go well.

I'm intimately familiar with SOC2 and I'm telling you it has practically nothing to do with software security and to the extent it does, the story is improved starkly and mechanically by agents. That's an outcome of how superficial SOC2 is, not a statement about how good agent code is.

Of course, the reality is that competent orgs generally exclude virtually all their software from their audit scope, and it would be a mark of incompetence to loop tooling-grade or line-of-business backoffice code into it. But even if you were crazy enough to do that, agents would improve your outcome.

Anybody claiming that SOC2 is a reason agent-based code will falter is talking about the world as they want it to be, not as it is.

Re: Let's talk about LLMs

#200

Post by yellowapple »

tptacek wrote: post #199
yellowapple wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A joke or not, a lot of organizations take SOC compliance and auditing seriously. Responding to someone requiring it with “who cares, the accountants doing the audits don't know anything anyway” is unlikely to go well.

I'm intimately familiar with SOC2 and I'm telling you it has practically nothing to do with software security and to the extent it does, the story is improved starkly and mechanically by agents. That's an outcome of how superficial SOC2 is, not a statement about how good agent code is. Of course, the reality is that competent orgs generally exclude virtually all their software from their audit scope, and it would be…

Your word for “competent” seems to be my word for “irresponsible”. A failure in that “line-of-business backoffice code” is exactly the sort of thing that'd cause irreparable damage in terms of regulatory compliance (and, you know, the tangible harms those regulations are meant to prevent). An LLM hallucination introducing bugs that make ERP transactions spontaneously disappear or allow users to bypass permissions checks on sensitive documents is the sort of thing that's catastrophic for any business that's not actually just a money laundering front (and hell, even then). Maybe you trust agentic AI to make fewer mistakes than humans, but I sure don't.

Like, I'm trying to avoid hyperbole here, but you're advocating for a wild-west sort of attitude that can, will, and has gotten people severely defrauded or outright injured/killed. And I know you know better than this because you've written at length about what it took to achieve SOC compliance at your current employer.

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